The other day, I came across a piece of paper on which I had written some thoughts one hot and stormy night inside of my hut. Since I still have a 3 month gap in my Gambian experience, I thought I'd include this as a journal entry on my blog. This was written on May 25th... towards the end of the hot season, when the sky first begins to cloud up and rain becomes a sudden possibility. This is one of the hardest times of the year in The Gambia. After 8 months of no rain, the dust and dirt in the air is at it's worst, and after 3 months of oppressive heat, everyone is ready for a change.

It's 9:30 p.m. The winds picked up about an hour ago, and I was forced to retreat inside my hot hut, shutting my windows and both doors. I've been lying down, trying to read and sweating. I got up to look at my thermometer. It's still 102 degrees F in here, but at least the temperature is going down. It was 108 degrees earlier. I've been getting up periodically to brush the dust off my body and take a broom to sweep off my bed. 3 weeks ago, we had our first rain of the season, and it started just like this... with lots of wind, which blew the dust around frantically. If I step outside, I can barely see my hand in front of my face because the dirt and dust is so thick. So I put up layers of plastic above my bed a week ago, anticipating this next rain. I'm glad I did. Even though I still have to sweep the bed off every half hour, it's better than the last time. It felt like someone was just standing above me, showering me with grass and dirt. I hope the plastic holds up ok - even with all the doors and windows shut, there's still plenty of opening for wind, rain, and dust to enter. But I guess that comes with living in a mud hut that has a grass roof. I'm hoping the rains will come soon. It will at least allow me to open the back door and let the breeze come in for a while. It's amazing how the rains clean out the sky and all the dirt in it. With the exception of the first rain 3 weeks ago, it hasn't rained here since October. It is now the end of May. Over 7 months of dryness can collect a lot of dust. I remember when going "inside" was actually like another whole world from the outside if you wanted it to be. If it was hot, you could turn on a fan (or maybe even AC). If it was cold, you could turn on the heat. If it was rainy and windy outside, you could listen and watch it all through the window while you sat safe, cozy, and dry. Here, "inside" is not a whole lot different than outside (except about 15 degrees hotter at the moment). It's really more like a shelter than a house. You still get a little wet in the rain, you can't control the temperature - you can just feel better knowing you're more sheltered than if you were outside.

It's interesting to read this now, after being home for over two weeks. The other day, I had been inside for most of the day. Later in the afternoon, I stepped outside and was surprised to see that the ground was wet because it had rained. I never even knew it. There are certain things that I miss about spending most of my day outside. I miss looking at the stars every night. I think I've only looked at the stars a few times since I've been back, and there wasn't really as much to see either. The Gambian sky is quite beatiful at night. And while it's strange to feel slightly disconnected from nature, even though the only thing separating myself from it is a few walls and a roof... I definitely enjoy being able cool myself off when it's hot, and never worrying that I may be woken up by rain and dirt falling on me in my sleep.

I am back in the US now, and am finally getting around to updating my blog. Since I have the amazing capabilities of high speed internet at my fingertips again, I thought I'd try to post this incredibly cute video of James playing football with my inflatable globe. I will continue to post some more pictures and an update of my final 3 months of peace corps service.

I’m back in Kombo, after four very busy months upcountry. I’ll try my best to summarize my experiences. After my long holiday for Thanksgiving and Christmas, I went back to Fatoto feeling motivated and energized. The weather was pleasant and cool in January and February, which helped me get a lot of work done, but it also provided some great opportunities to spend quality time with my Gambian family. The Gambians were wearing winter jackets and lighting fires every night. I was sleeping with a sheet and a blanket at night. At times, the temperature even dropped below 50 degrees F. I spent long hours at school, then came home, worked in my garden, cooked myself dinner using fresh vegetables from my garden (lettuce, tomato, carrots, eggplant), then spent the evenings huddled around a fire with my family listening to and telling stories. Fula story-telling is delightful. The person who wants to tell the story says “Talin Talin.” Then the rest of the people sitting around say “Talin Dimas.” This roughly translates as “Story, Story” “Tell us a story.” They would ask me to tell stories too, at which point I would stumble through old stories from my childhood, with adaptations to fit my limited Pulaar vocabulary. It’s interesting to note the difference in themes between western stories and Gambian stories. I realized that many of the stories I told were teaching the values of hard work and honesty. I told the story of the little red hen, but instead of the red hen planting and harvesting wheat to make bread with, I changed it to rice and peanuts… and instead of making bread, she made gossi gerte, a sweet rice porridge with pounded peanuts. My family told me stories like the one about the clever rabbit who outsmarted the hungry crocodile.

At school, I finally began implementing some of my project ideas. Since last year, I have recognized a need to provide students with opportunities for small group and one-on-one instruction. Our school runs two shifts, so teachers teach grades 9 through 12 in the morning, then teach grades 7 and 8 in the afternoon. If a student needs help from a teacher, they have to come back to school in the evening to meet with teachers. For most of our students, this is impossible. Even for those who don’t have to walk several miles back to their villages from school, once they get home, they are given work do to from their families, and do not have the chance to return to school later. The busy schedule of the teachers creates other problems as well… the class sizes are large, and the curriculum is immense, so most teachers have little time for planning and implementing quality student-centered lessons. In an English speaking school for students with limited English abilities, it is essential to provide them with opportunities for small-group or individual instruction. Despite the disadvantageous learning environment, however, there is a small group of bright, hard-working students who still manage to excel in school. In a place where teachers are accustomed to working with limited resources, these students seem to be a resource that is often over-looked. It is these students who inspired me to begin a peer tutoring program. We chose 24 students in grades 9 through 12 and provided them with some basic tutor-training. The program has been moderately successful so far. We’re still working on changes that may make it more effective. The tutors though, have been a true inspiration. They have come up with some inventive ways to help their school. And I’ve been lucky to have an amazing counterpart for this project, my friend and fellow-teacher, Mbara Saine. His optimism is contagious. He hopes to nationalize the program, so we’re currently working on putting together a Peer Tutoring newsletter to distribute to other schools in The Gambia.

The Peer Tutoring Program has been my most time-consuming project, but I’ve also been working on a few other small projects. I’ve been holding monthly teaching and learning aid sessions for my teachers at school. We work together on finding ways to make learning a more interactive process, and actually spend time together creating teaching and learning aids. It’s been wonderfully successful because the teachers collaborate and gain ideas from each other.

Between these projects, teaching classes, holding regular science club meetings, and working in my garden work, I’ve managed to stay pretty busy through the past few months. When the weather was still nice and cool, it was easy to stay motivated, but now that the hot season has arrived, my energy has drastically decreased. Before coming down to Kombo last week, the mid-day temperature (in the shade) was above 110 degrees. The temperature here in Kombo is much colder. It has been a welcome vacation from the heat.

Some other fun events that have happened since Christmas...

Panketos weekend.A popular sweet treat in The Gambia is the panketo. It's a small peice of sweet dough deep fried in oil. It's similar to a doughnut, but different. Panketos are cooked for weddings and naming ceremonies, and you can always find women in busy market places walking around selling them. The thing is, no matter where you go in The Gambia, panketos are always the same. There's no variety or creativity. Liza and I came up with an idea one day to make our own panketos of different varieties. And then we thought it would be interesting to go to a busy place and sell them... one of the busiest places in Basse is the car park, where all the vehicles pick up and drop passengers going to various places in The Gambia and neighboring west african countries. The Basse Car Park is always crowded and busy with people traveling and people selling goods. This seemed like our ideal place to sell panketos. And not only did we want to sell our panketos there, but we cooked them at the car park too. It was a fun social experiment to see the reaction from people when we told them we wanted to cook panketos and sell them. We made panketos filled with chocolate and peanut butter, panketos filled with banana, and panketos with an orange glaze. The entire experience was pretty hillarious. When the women walked by trying to sell us their panketos, we would try to sell them ours. Many people bought our panketos just out of curiosity of what these crazy white people were doing cooking and selling food in the dusty, crowded basse car park. But most people really liked them. They were especially confused though about having to make a choice between three different types. "What do you mean which one? I just want one panketo" While the experience was really just for fun, we are hoping that it might have inspired at least one person to get creative when it comes to selling their products.

James Njie turns one years old.Little James turned one years old in February so I threw him a small birthday party, complete with noise makers and balloons. I made him a birthday hat that said "Hitande 1" (Hitande is "year" in Pulaar). He really didn't like wearing the hat though, so it ended up being passed between the other children. Liza and Ian both came up for the big event. We cooked black-bean chilli for my family and made a birthday cake in my solar oven.

Well, my parents finally made it to The Gambia... they left yesterday. I was sad to see them go, but we had a great time while they were here.

We spent the first week traveling upcountry to see some local tourist sights and visit my village. It was a very busy but fun week. We joined a tour, which traveled partially by land and partially by boat. I especially enjoyed the boating parts of our trip. I've traveled the length of this country more times than I can count now, but always by public transport on poor roads. For a country that pretty much consists of a river and the narrow strip of land that surrounds the river, it's not often that I get to travel on the river... so it was definitely a treat. And on top of that, we really traveled in style on our boat trips. We were served coffee and tea, cold beverages, and lunch. We even drank bottled wine (not wine in a box) out of real wine glasses! The other members of our tour were mostly bird enthusiasts from the UK. On our series of boat trips throughout the week and saw not only birds, but chimpanzees, hippos, dolphins, monkeys, and baboons. It was a nice reminder that I do live in Africa, after all. Usually, the only animals I see are goats, sheep chickens, and cows.

For one day of our trip, we made it to Fatoto, where my American family was finally able to meet my Gambian family... and my father, James, was able to meet his tokara (name-sake), James. They also ate some good Gambian food and were able to visit my school and meet some of the teachers I work with. One of the highlights of my trip was that my mother stayed in Fatoto with me overnight. It was a short visit, but at least we had time to walk around my village, meet some

lunch in my hut

of my students, and spend some time visiting with my family. She was subjected to Pulaar lessons from my brother, Samba. She took bucket baths and used the pit latrine like a pro. She even traveled back to Basse with me in an overcrowded Gile Gile. She did great.

My Gambian family was thrilled to have my parents there. It meant as much to them as it meant to me.

James with James

Other hightlights of the upcountry trip: We spent one whole day in Basse, seeing the sights and hanging out with my Basse family and friends, mom and dad had the experience of having to help push-start one of the vans we were traveling in (a true Gambian experience), I finally got to see dad sleep in a tent, and mom and I took jimbeh (drumming) lessons, followed by African dancing.

After our week upcountry, we spent one week at the beach. We took a few "excursions" for shopping and sight-seeing, but mostly just spent time relaxing and eating good food. I know my parents were relieved to be sleeping in airconditioned rooms with constant electricity after some their upcountry accomodations. And now that I've had a week to relax, it's time to head back upcountry and back to work!

In October, Josiah and I traveled through Senegal, Mali, and Guinea. It was a great trip, overall, but not everything went as smoothly as planned. There were more than a handful of situations which tested our patience and tempers. Luckily, we turned out to be good travel partners. When we found ourselves extremely bored or anxious about something, Josiah kept us laughing with his unending reserve of poor jokes, random theoretical questions, or funny stories. Josiah combated the boring and tedious with witty and funny stuff. I kept us occupied with discussions of life, love, and spirituality. Between the two of us, we were able to stay sane through our more trying moments. We also found amusement in keeping a tally of various aspects of our trip. Here are some of the numbers from our tally. (keep in mind, this was over a period of only 11 days).

Number of different currencies we used: 4

Number of international borders crossed: 5

Number of attempted bribes: 3

Number of encounters with aggressive officers carrying guns: 3

Number of times Kristy had to prevent Josiah from getting arrested: 3

Number of different types of public transport vehicles taken: 7

Number of hours spent waiting for transport: 57

Number of hours spent actually traveling: 78

Total number of travel hours: 135

Number of times we had to say “I don’t speak French. A nani Pulaar?” (“Do you speak Pulaar?”): approximately 20 times a day

Number of cups of coffee consumed (each): 28

Number of times we ate meals consisting of a combination of beef and egg: at least once a day

Number of cans of tuna we hauled along on the trip and consumed: 20

Number of salads consumed: 1 (each)

Number of times we were called “toubab”: 10 times, and all within the final 8 hours of the trip

Number of kilometers hiked through the beautiful forests of Guinea: 24

Number of open soars on Kristy’s feet after the 18km hike: 10

Number of stressful situations that occurred in Guinea (excluding travel situations): 0

Josiah and I think these numbers speak for themselves, but for those who would like a little further explanation, here is the story our adventure…

The logical place to begin a trip east from The Gambia is from the bustling “city” of Basse, which has a large car garage with vehicles traveling to all major towns in Senegal and surrounding countries on most days of the week. The logical choice, however, was not the way we decided to go. If you look on a map, my village- Fatoto- is far closer to Tamaba Kounda (the first major town we would be traveling through) than Basse. Leaving from Basse would have meant traveling west from Fatoto to Basse, then back east again to Tamba. Besides, Josiah wanted to come visit my village for a few days before the trip. So we decided to take a “short cut” to Tamba from Fatoto.

The only problem with leaving from Fatoto was figuring out how we would get to Senegal. I am less than 15km from the eastern border of The Gambia and Senegal, but transport East from Fatoto is practically non-existent. My brother, Samba, told me about these tractors, which pick up bags of sugar in the Fatoto market and transport them to the border town, Picadus, in Senegal (sugar in Senegal is much more expensive than in The Gambia so they smuggle it across the border, then sell it for a profit). Samba assured me that the sugar tractors ran every day. So that was our plan… to hitch a ride on a sugar tractor to the border, and catch public transport from there. (I have to throw in a cheesy pun here. When I told my site-mate, Ian, about our plans to ride with the sugar tractor, he said “That should be a sweet ride!” ha ha.)

Due to the fact that we live in Africa, and should never have counted on something which happens consistently every day to happen on the day we want it to… we discovered the day before we were planning to depart for our trip that there was a good chance that no sugar tractor would be leaving the next day. They had hauled too many bags the day before, and probably wouldn’t have a full load to haul the following day. So we had to devise another form of transport. We considered walking it. But 13km with our large packs seemed a little ambitious. I spoke with one of my friends, Cherno, about hiring his donkey cart to give us a ride. He said he would be happy to let us use the donkey cart, but his donkey was pregnant, and could not make the journey. So then we asked a second man, Omar, if we could hire his donkey to use with Cherno’s cart. He agreed, so now we began negotiating the price. Negotiating and bargaining are the way things work here, but it can get tricky – especially when you have to negotiate with 2 people for the same service. After about an hour of negotiations, we came to an agreement and paid our money. They told us to come at 6:30 in the morning and we would leave.

The next morning, the donkey cart was only an hour late (not a bad wait for transport in Africa). Our “chauffeurs” were the two adolescent sons of Omar, the owner of the donkey. The road was very bad. In fact, it’s difficult to even call it a road in some places. Needless to say, it was a bumpy ride, and I felt lucky that I only fell off of the cart once. When we weren’t holding on for dear life, we were enjoying the scenery. We passed through villages and areas of The Gambia that most people never see. We felt the donkey cart ride was an appropriate way to begin our trip (thus began the tally of number of different types of public transport vehicles we used).

From Picadus, we caught a ride with a Gile Gile going to Tamba. Here, we were excited to find a restaurant that served hamburgers (hamburgers are a delicacy for us). The waitress asked if we wanted hamburgers or a king burgers. We had to laugh. The answer was obvious. “Bring us King Burgers, of course.” A king burger is a hamburger served French-style: two hamburger patties with a fried egg on top. Senegal is one of the many West African countries previously colonized by the French. Therefore, the main language spoken in Senegal is French, the currency is the CFA (Central African Franc), and much of the culture (including the food) has a French influence as well. Hence, the King Burger. We were so impressed by our King Burgers in Tamba, and we knew that all of the countries we would be traveling through are French-speaking countries, so we decided to make it a goal to eat as many king burgers as possible on this trip. (Thus, the beginning of another tally: number of king burgers or other combinations of beef and egg eaten on the trip). Obviously, nutrition was not a huge priority for us. This was our vacation. Bring on the king burgers.

After gorging ourselves on King Burgers, we found a bar that was playing the big football game between The Gambia and Senegal. (Just a side note here- by “football,” I’m talking about the game that everyone in the world besides Americans call football… not the US version of football, which involves very little contact between the foot and the ball). This was an important game for both Gambians and Senegalese, since they have traditionally been huge rivals. We sat in the very back and quietly rooted for The Gambia. Luckily, we left before the end of the game, which ended in a tie score between the two countries, knocking Senegal out of the play-offs and causing riots throughout the country.

The next day, we left Tamba, headed to the town of Kadira, which lies on the border between Senegal and Mali, and boarded a large bus for Bamako (the capital of Mali). At the border, we encountered our first aggressive officer with a gun (the first of yet another tally). He was the immigration officer. It seems that the basic role of an immigration officer is to collect all the passports and ID cards of the passengers in a vehicle and inspect them for authenticity and/or the presence of visas, if required. By holding on to everyone’s ID cards, they are able to collect bribes by demanding money in exchange for the return of your passport or ID card. And this guy was determined to get paid. He denied being able to speak any language besides French, which forced us to solicit help from one of the few English-speaking passengers on our bus. He was a nice man who was unfortunate enough to help us by translating for this belligerent officer. What caused the trouble was that we did not have visas for Mali, but this was not our fault. The Malian embassy in The Gambia does not issue visas, and told us that we would be able to buy them at the border. The officer told us our visas would cost 15,000 CFA (about $33) a piece, and we would also have to pay an additional 33,000 CFA each as a “penalty.” After many words were passed through our poor translator, the officer was getting very angry and shouting at all three of us in French. Josiah was loosing his composure, and I was forced to take over negotiations. Eventually, I decided to call the Peace Corps Safety and Security officer in Mali, but when I pulled out the phone to make the call, the officer angrily conceded to giving us our visas for 15,000 CFA a piece and dismissed the “penalty”. Unfortunately, when he realized he would not be able to get his bribe from us, he held the ID card of our “translator,” requiring him to pay 5,000 CFA before getting it back. Upon returning to the bus, we refunded the man’s money. We felt terrible that he was forced to pay simply for helping us.

Due to our delay at the border and several other long stops along the way, we didn’t arrive in Bamako until 3:30 in the morning. After a few hours of sleep, we found our way to the Peace Corps office in Bamako. This was on a Monday morning. One of the things we needed to do in Mali was fill out our ballots for the American elections. The reason why we needed to do this in Mali was because Peace Corps The Gambia had decided that the way they would get all Gambian PCV’s to vote was by sending ballots on October mail-run. They sent a message at the end of September to all PCV’s, stating that we should be at our sites when mail-run arrived so that we could receive the write-in ballots and vote. Mail-run would bring all the ballots back to the capitol, and they would mail them all out together. Unfortunately, Josiah and I would both be traveling when mail run came to our sites in October. I completed and mailed the paperwork for my absentee ballot in April, but had not received it yet. Before the trip, I called the office, searching for any alternative we may have to still be able to vote in the elections. Our office called ahead to the Malian office, and found out that we could vote through them, and they would mail the ballots for us… so that’s what we decided to do.

Unfortunately, we arrived at the office on Columbus Day… Not a holiday celebrated in Africa unless you work for an American institution like the Peace Corps. So the office was closed. We would have to vote on Tuesday. In the meantime, we found a room with the Catholic Mission in Bamako and set out to explore the city. Bamako is huge, busy, and crowded. The streets are packed with traffic and road-side vendors. There was much to do and see. We walked through the immense market, including the “fetish,” or witchcraft market, which consisted of vendors selling all sorts of creepy items: animal heads and bones, a variety of herbs, plants, animal skins, and much more. The street food in Bamako is delicious. I found fried dough patties filled with ground beef and boiled eggs, which I nicknamed “fried king burgers.”

One of our favorite places in Bamako was a bar and restaurant called ‘the Apaloosa”. Picture this if you can: The owners are French, the cocktail waitresses are Ukrainian and Malian, and the wait staff are Malian. The owners have a strange affinity for the American West. The place was full of pictures of Native American Indian Chiefs and cowboy paraphernalia, as well as other American pop culture items. There was a large American flag with a picture of Jimi Hendrix printed over the stars. There were American license plates and bumper stickers. Josiah said the walls looked a lot like a TIG Fridays or Chilis. And the best part: the Malian waiters wore complete cowboy ensembles, including cowboy hats.

We enjoyed Bamako, but we struggled with language. The official language in Mali is French, but the dominant native language is Bombara, which is similar to the Gambian language, Mandinka. Both Josiah and I were taught Pulaar, the language of the Fula tribe. Fulas are all over West Africa, and we were lucky enough to find a few in Bamako, but not many. And although we’re both familiar with Mandinka, neither of us speak it well enough for it to help us understand or communicate with Bomaras. In addition, neither of us speak French.

One unfortunate incident occurred while in Bamako: while walking back to our room from the large market, I was taking pictures of the streets of Bamako with my brand new camera. There is so much to see on these streets. We passed a crowded alley full of people shopping and selling goods. I snapped a picture of the alley, which, unfortunately, was right next to a large bank. In front of the bank was a security officer (this is #2 on the aggressive officer with a gun tally)… The man shouted for us to come to him. Looking back on it now, I wish we had just kept walking, but instead, we obeyed and went to him. He was pointing at my camera and shouting at us in French. I may not be able to speak French, but I could understand that he was upset about the picture I had just taken. I was about to turn my camera on to show him that the picture I took was a picture of the market… not a picture of him. At this point, he and second officer both grabbed me by the arms as he tried to pry the camera out of my hands. I was holding onto it tightly. At some point in the chaos, I heard Josiah’s voice in my ear: “Kristy, let go of the camera.” I let go, and the officer took the camera and put it in his pocket. I asked Josiah “Why did you tell me to let go? Now he’s going to keep my camera.” Josiah responded, “Well, you had two men with guns grab you violently and try to take your camera, but you refused to let go of it. I was worried about what they would do next.”

Josiah went to find a phone to call the Peace Corps office while I stayed with the officer, trying my best to communicate with him. After much pleading, we finally went inside the bank to talk to the bank manager, who also could not speak English. Eventually, I did get my camera back, but it was a grueling process. And being a Peace Corps Volunteer is what probably saved the day. In Africa, white skin is a symbol of wealth. Almost everyone believes that being white means being rich. It helps that I can speak one African language and that I have a better-than-average understanding of West African culture. However, I am still white, which makes me a red flag for greedy people looking for money. As often as I’ve found myself trying to reason with people who tell me I am rich, I also can’t help but understand why they believe this. By American standards, I am nothing close to rich ( I live off a few dollars a day), but in comparison to most people here, I am still rich. The camera I was using was a gift from my family. It was probably worth a half a year’s salary to that man. It didn’t justify his aggressive actions, but his ignorance is based on truth.

After this encounter, we decided to cut our trip to Mali short by a day or two. I was ready to head to Guinea, where Fula is a common language, and we would be hiking through forests in the mountains. We arrived at the garase (place for taking public transport) in Bamako at nine in the morning on a Thursday. The way transport works in many places is like this: you join a vehicle, pay for your ticket, then wait until all the seats are full. I've had to wait hours in The Gambia before for one vehicle to fill before we can leave. That's why, in The Gambia, I often travel in a vehicle called a "set-plas," which is a french word borrowed from the Senegalese, meaning "seven seats." These are what we would call a station wagon in the states. In a set-plas, one person sits in the passenger seat next to the driver, three in the middle, and three in the back. These vehicles are more expensive than the common Gile Gile, but they fill faster and make fewer stops, making them ideal for traveling longer distances. In The Gambia and Senegal, drivers are penalized if it is discovered that they have more than seven people in one of these vehicles. Hence, the "set-plas" part of it.

In Guinea, however, the roads are too poor for larger vehicles like Gile Gile's and Busses. So the "set-plas" is the primary means of transport. But they have no regulations for how many people can be seated inside of one. So Guinean drivers typically squeeze about 9 inside: 2 in the front seat, 4 in the middle, and 3 in the back. Then they allow other passengers to ride on top of the vehicle. So it was one of these vechicles that we were taking to Guinea. Josiah and I were numbers 4 and 5. We still had 4 passengers left before we could leave. So we waited, and we waited, and we waited. It's amazing how time seems to have a different quality to it when you are just waiting around. I made friends with a nice Fula lady who was selling food in the garase. I sat with her all day long and watched her fry up pieces of plantains, sweet potatoes and potatoes. Josiah wandered most of the day. Sometimes he would sit in the car. Sometimes he would join me and my new friend, Fatoumata. Sometimes he just wandered around. He became particularly attached to the senile old lady in our vehicle that we nicknamed "crazy," after we found her talking to her reflection in the car window. Josiah and Crazy would sit in the car together and share food... she would pass him peices of oranges, and he would bring her some of the fried plantains that Fatoumata had cooked. After waiting for 10 hours (at this point, it's dark outside), the driver told us we would have to come back in the morning. We found a hotel room, slept a few hours, and returned early the next morning.

Our car finally left at 8:30... we were excited to be moving on. At the border of Mali and Guinea, we encountered our third agressive officer with a gun. Actually, he was quite calm compared to our first two, but was still requiring us to give him a bribe. I called the Peace Corps Saftey and Security Officer in Guinea, and handed the phone over to the immigration officer... Yet another incident where it was good to be a Peace Corps Volunteer.

After traveling for 21 hours, we arrived in the town of Pita, where we stayed for one day and one night. Josiah slept for most of the day, while I walked around town and into the market. Pita is a large town surrounded by mountains and rivers. The weather was cool and sunny. The people were almost all Fulas... so I could actually talk to them. The food was delicious, and cheep. I ate a lot of local fruit. Oranges, guavas and a strange-looking fruit the locals called sop-sop.

The next day, we took transport to the small village of Douke, where a man name Hassan Bah (a Fula), runs a sort of eco-lodge experience. "Eco" in the sense that you live in a hut, use a guest house, and bathe outside (This is really no different from how I live in village regularly, so it was kind of like being "home"). Then, either Hassan or his brother Abdoulie, take the guests on hiking tours through the forests to see amazing rock formations, cliffs, valleys, and waterfalls. They also provide all of your meals. We only stayed for 2 days, but I wish we could have stayed longer. The scenery was amazing. The weather was beautiful. It was exactly what I needed after our hectic travels through Mali.

We went on a nice, easy hike our first day there. On the second day, Abdoulie took us for a strenuous 18km hike that they have named "Chutes and Ladders." The first 10 -12 km of the hike is all down-hill through high grasses, rocky paths and overgrown trails. It was beautiful, but I couldn't help thinking "We're still going down. We'll have to begin going up at some point." We stopped for lunch by a waterfall before beginning our upward journey, and it's a good thing we did, because we really needed all the energy we could find. This was the part that earned the hike the title of "Chutes and Ladders." We were essentially climbing up a steep canyon wall. In some places, we used a steep and rocky path, but in other places, we had to climb ladders. The ladders are locally constructed from thick tree branches and peices of bark. They were very sturdy, but slippery in places. In some instances, the ladders were positioned right next to waterfalls, which provided a steady mist of water, making the wood slippery. I lost count of the number of ladders we climbed... perhaps 20? And the "trails" we used in between the ladders were just as challenging (continuously steep and slippery in places). I'm thankful that I managed to keep my balance. Josiah called the trail the "stair master." It never really flattened out until we were finished with our hike. We just climbed straight up for 8 km. I was wearing my new Chaoco hiking sandals, which still need some more "breaking-in." By the end of the hike, I counted 10 open cuts and blisters on my feet. As exhausted and soar as we were after finishing the hike, it was by far my favorite part of our trip. And here's an amazing fact: that path we hiked on is a main route for locals traveling between the villages on top of the canyon and in the valley below. The women climb those slippery ladders in flip-flops and with loads on their heads!

After 2 days in Douke, we said farewell to Hassan and his family and headed to Labe, a crowded town with a busy market place. We walked around the town, bought some fruit from the market, ate some good food (including more king burgers), drank coffee and good beer, and found a cheep but clean place to stay the night. The next day, we decided to begin our journey back to The Gambia. This time, we headed to the car park fully prepared to wait a while, even stay an extra night if we needed to. After waiting for 11 hours, we were told there would be no cars leaving directly for Basse (possibly for several days), so we joined a vehicle going to Senegal. Once again, it was 10 people crammed into a station wagon. They told us we would have to share the front passenger seat. Thus began the most physically uncomfortable, sleep-deprived, 21 hour journey of my life. Looking back on the experience now, we have had a few good laughs, but at the time, it was pretty miserable. When we were finally dropped off in Senegal, we were thankful to get out of the car and stretch our cramped muscles. We waited a few more hours for yet another ride to Velengara, Senegal. This should have been a quick trip- about an hour- but our gile gile ran out of gas, so everyone in the vehicle had to get out and wait for a few more hours while the drivers went to find gas. Finally they returned, added a little bit of gasoline, push-started the vehicle, and eventually dropped us off in Velingara. At this point, we are less than 15 km from the border of The Gambia and Senegal, and less than 25 km from Basse. In Velingara, we had to deal with yet another money scam, which almost required another phone call to Peace Corps. Fortunately, we settled it ourselves before it got too far. After waiting for yet another vehicle to fill, we finally piled into a "bush-taxi," which started after several pushes around the car park and spouted out a bunch of toxic fumes. At this point, the sun had set, and the road to Basse was terrible and full of huge mud puddles. We spent more time pushing the vehicle when it would get stuck or stall than we did actually inside of the vehicle. At one point, I realized I was standing knee deep in a large mud puddle and had lost my flip-flop somewhere... And we still had to go through customs and immigration for The Gambia.About 37 hours after beginning our journey from Labe, we finally arrived in Basse, covered in mud, and absolutely exhausted. Traveling in West Africa is a truly unique experience. I'm happy that I did it, but as they like to say here... "It's not easy!"So that's the whole trip, in perhaps more detail than it needed to be. We ended up coming back a few days earlier than planned, so we spent one whole day sleeping, and two more days just relaxing in Basse before heading back to our sites. It was quite an adventure!

Today is September 11th. The new group swears-in as Peace Corps Vounteers tomorrow. They are very excited and quite ready to finish with training and get on with the rest of their service here. And I agree... it's been a busy 10 weeks. Since they arrived here on July 3rd, my life has been a blur of traveling between Fatoto and various training sessions. But my brief visits to Fatoto this summer were calm and relaxing. It rained there every day in August, which kept the temperatures down and made it possible for me to spend time lying in bed, listening to the rain patter on my family's corrogate roof and reading books. I've always enjoyed rainy days, but after the 3 months of living through temperatures in the 110's and 120's, I have a whole new aprreciation for rain, or even just clouds. The country has undergone it's rainy season transformation. Areas that were sandy, brown, and barren are all lush and green now. The roads, which are difficult enough to travel in the dry season are just patches of mud, with scattered lakes and numerous potholes. Every available patch of land has been sowed with seeds of millet, rice, and corn. Most of these plants are already taller than I am.

When it was not raining, I was outside in my garden, weeding and composting and sowing new seeds. Those who sent me seeds from the states will be happy to hear that I've managed to get some of them to grow, including zucinni, cucumber, cilantro, basil, sunflowers, and watermellon. In addition, I have three garden beds full of tomato plants, one bed of bell pepper plants, and a few sickly-looking cabage plants. Nothing has fruited yet, but some of my plants have begun to flower. I also intercropped squash, pumpkin, and watermellon in my family's cous fields, which have also begun to grow nicely. I've discovered a new passion for gardening that I never knew I had before now. Sometimes I wonder what my Peace Corps experience would be like if I could just plant seeds and work in gardens all day. I hope that I'll have the time keep up with it once school starts.

I will be heading back to Fatoto on Sunday. School was supposed to open this week, but in typical Gambian fashion, few teachers, headmasters, or students actually show up for the first week of school... so I'm not actually missing anything. I'm excited and hesitant to get back into the classroom. I am working on a few projects that I'd like to implement in my school and my community this year. If I manage to do it all, it will be a busy year, once again. In addition, I'm planning on taking a few weeks off of school next month and actually getting out of The Gambia. Josiah and I have decided to do a little bit of traveling. Originally, we planned on traveling to Sierra Leone, but after researching the costs of that trip, we've decided to do a slightly different trip. The visa itself for Sierra Leonne is $100. There are less expensive countries to travel through, so we will be traveling through Senegal, Mali, and Guinea. I'm really looking forward to it. Now that I've traveled all of my little slice of West Africa, I'm ready to see some more!

The past three weeks have seemed to pass by in a blur... After finishing the planning sessions for PST, I had two or three blessed days to relax. One of these days was my 3oth birthday (June 30th). Luckily, most of my closest PCV friends were able to share it with me. When they asked what I wanted to do, I told them I wanted an American cook-out. So we grilled burgers, ate potato salad and garden salad, listened to music and just relaxed. It was perfect. Then a few days later, the pace of my life picked-up again...

The new group of education trainees arrived on July 3rd. I spent one hectic week in Kombo with them, running from one session to the next, spending time with them between and after their training sessions, and trying to sqeeze in my own meetings and work on secondary projects on the side. I've enjoyed getting to know the trainees and being a part of the training process so far, despite the long hours. They are so full of energy and motivation. In some ways, it has re-charged me a little too. I'm excited for them and all of the things they hope to achieve! I've especially gotten to know the four trainees that are learning to speak Pulaar, which is the language I learned (am still learning, actually). On Thursday, the trainees left for their training villages, and I went went them. I spent 3 days in a village called Fula Kunda, which was only 4km from my old training village, Jiroff, so I was able to go back and visit my old family for a few hours. It was nice to be back in my old training village when I could actually have converstations with people! The rest of the time, I spent with the trainees. In the beginning, I helped them set up things like their water filters and bed-nets, but I basically just answered a lot of their questions and provided a little emotional support. They seem to be going through the usual things that happen on your first move to village. Stomach issue, language communication problems, getting used to eating the food, missing family and friends, etc. A few of them had leaky houses or insect issues. In the beginning, these things can be overwhelming, but I think they're doing great despite it all. After only two days, they already started working together in the garden. A nice thing for me was that the four of them gave me thank-you letters and a little gift bag filled with treats they brought from the states to say thanks!

Tomorrow, I will be traveling back upcountry. I have been gone for over three weeks now. I miss Fatoto and I miss my family. I'm looking forward to getting back. It will only be a short trip though, because I will be meeting the trainees in Tendaba in less than two weeks! This summer will involve a lot of traveling for me, but I'm looking foward to some of the work I'll be doing. I'm sure September will come again before I know it....

For special occasions, African women like to dye their hands and feet in different patterns, using a plant they call Fudon. My sister, Salimatou (who lives in Senegal but was visiting last month) did my feet and her own.

With the rains come all sorts of small creatures that have been in hiding through the hot season, including scorpions. This little guy was found right behind my back yard, hiding under a brick. We also found two more in my compound recently and my friend, Alieu, got a nasty sting from one the other day.

One activity I did with my science club was making making insect repellant. Leaves from the Neem tree naturally repell insects, so we extracted the insect repellant from the leaves by boiling them in water and using the water to make the lotion. The students sold the insect repellant in the community to raise money for the science club.

I have just finished one more “chapter” in my life here in Africa. School is finished for the school year, I have finally prepared my garden and planted some of my seeds (including some of the seeds that were mailed to me from the US… lets keep our fingers crossed that they will grow here!), and I have also been coping, internally, with some serious cultural issues that have effected me on a deep emotional level (more on this later, perhaps). Between my work, extra projects, my emotional journey, and the continuous heat since February, the past few months have gone by in a blur. On Monday, I traveled from Fatoto to the Kombos to begin my training and preparation for PST (Pre-Service-Training) of the new group, who will be arriving on Thursday. It was the first time I have made the entire trip in a day, by myself. The trip took about 10 hours (which is making pretty good time for travel conditions in The Gambia, despite the fact that it’s less than 500 km), and I spent a good deal of this day reflecting on the whirlwind of events that have consumed my life recently. Since arriving, I have been caught-up in a series of training sessions, meetings, and reconnecting with friends, so today is the first opportunity that I have had to sit down and write about some of these things.

So first, some school stories....

My last trip to Kombo at the end of April for IST (In-Service-Training) took me from my classes for about a week and half. So upon returning to Fatoto, I was scrambling to make up the classes that I missed. With the limited time I have to teach, it makes it difficult to make-up for lost days (And there’s no such thing as “substitute teachers” in The Gambia). Keep in mind that the Gambian curriculum is shaped by the syllabus for the WASSCE exam. For general science, this comprises about 40 pages of science objectives that each student is “required” to learn from grade 10 thru grade 12 in preparation for the final exam. There is no division of material for each level, and the scope of material is vast. Topics range from human body systems (the skeletal system, the digestive system, the respiratory system, etc.), to basic biology (cells, biological classification, nutrition, ecology), to more advanced biology (genetics, photosynthesis, cellular respiration), to all levels of chemistry (the periodic table, chemical reactions, acids and bases, biochemistry, even organic chemistry), to all levels of physics (Newton’s laws, forces, torque, levers, electromagnetic radiation, magnetism, circuits, and much more), to geology (soil and water sciences), even nuclear fission and biotechnology. Basically, all of the topics that most high school students in the united states cover in a four year time period, while attending each class approximately five hours a week… these are expected of Gambian students to learn in three years, while attending each class for approximately 2 hours a week. Since I had little information about what each grade level learned in the prior years (teacher turn-over is high and there are no previous records to refer back to), I ended up developing my own list of topics, based on the syllabus, for each of the three grade levels, that I hoped would expand on the few things I was sure they had covered in previous years, after looking at old notebooks that students allowed me to borrow.

The most difficult class for me to teach this year was my grade 11 class. For this class, I decided to focus on basic Chemistry and Physics, since it seemed that none of the students in prior years had seemed to cover any of these things, and after looking at some copies of old WASSCE exams, I realized that at least 2/3 of the questions related to these branches of science. So I’ve found myself trying to teach topics that I learned years ago myself, with limited laboratory resources, and a classroom of students who’s math skills are at least 5 levels below their grade level, and who have little to no experience in abstract thinking skills. Needless to say, this adventure was a continuous learning process for my students, as well as for myself. At one point, I realized that we needed to stop and just practice math. We spent about three weeks on basic mathematics skills that are absolutely necessary to understand and complete basic science problems. For example, adding and subtracting negative numbers (My students told me that -3 plus 2 is 5), or simply dividing numbers like 25 into 100. Once you add a second digit onto a number, they loose any interest in trying to multiply or divide with that number. Even if it’s just a zero. Most students can’t tell me that 60 divided by 30 is 2. And don’t get me started on decimal points. I hate giving them any problem that involves numbers with decimal points. A few of them have calculators, but most cannot afford them, so I try my best to keep the math as simple as I can, just to get the basic scientific ideas across to them. Some of my students have been working very hard. I spend a lot of time after-school or in my compound with students that come for extra help. And fortunately, these students are excelling. I am very proud of them. But without the extra help, it would have been hopeless. I have experimented with different group-activities that divide my 4 or 5 exceptional students up into separate groups to work on problems with their classmates. We’ve turned them into friendly competitions between “teams,” and this has been somewhat successful. I’ve found that when a peer is available to explain a difficult concept, it can be immensely helpful for the struggling students. This is why I’m working on developing a peer tutoring program at Fatoto SSS, which I hope to implement next year. I’m also toying with the idea of starting a “Math club,” but I have few ideas of what I could do with a club like that, since my background is not in Math. So if anyone has any suggestions, I would definitely welcome them.

While I’m still on the topic of school, I would like to describe what I privately call the "final exam fiasco". Because the school does not have computers, typewriters, copy machines, or even electricity, it is impossible to type and print exams or tests. When we give tests to the students, the questions are written on the blackboard, and the students copy them down on a piece of paper, then answer the questions. This limits the amount of questions you can give on a test, and increases the opportunities for cheating, which is very common here, since most students just memorize sections of their notes and write them as answers on tests, whether they understand the words they are memorizing or not. For final exams, however, each student is supposed to have their own test copy for each subject. In order to accomplish this, all of us teachers had to type our final exam questions back in April and mail them (when I say “mail”, I mean pass them to someone who is traveling that way) 450 km to Kombo, where the school hires someone to type and copy each of the exams… then sends them back up-country, hopefully in time for the final exams. We received our exams in time, but when we opened them, we found terrible mistakes made by the typist, and they copying job was absurd. You couldn’t read most of the questions on some of the exams, which meant that before the exam, the teacher had to read each of the questions out-loud for the students to fill-in the missing portions on their exams. The Math exams were the worst, with numbers super-imposed on other numbers, and tons of mistakes in the problems which would change the entire outcome of the students’ answers unless corrected. On top of it all, I had gone through the trouble to type my own copy of the grade 11 exam because I wanted to include diagrams that I could not expect the typist to reproduce. I had done this on my last trip to Kombo in April, then met with someone who passed my exams along to the typist/copier. However, instead of simply copying my exam, which was already typed nicely with no mistakes, they re-typed it, with many mistakes, and excluded the diagrams completely. Those were the copies sent. We discovered this on a Monday, and they would be taking the exams on the following Tuesday. The principal decided to bring the original copy with him to Basse the next day, where he was traveling for a meeting, and make copies at the REO (Regional Education Office) there. When he returned to school on Thursday, I asked him if he was able to get the copies made. He said the REO was too busy to do it on Wednesday, but they said they would copy it and try to send it with someone heading to Fatoto before Tuesday. I was traveling to Basse on Saturday and returning on Sunday, so I told him that if they could give the copies to my friend who works at the REO, I could pick them up from her (the REO is closed on week-ends). He said he would call them and tell them. Then Fatoto lost all cell-phone service from Wednesday evening until Friday afternoon. No one was able to make or receive calls, so we could not get through to Basse until the REO was already closed for the day, and the papers were locked inside of it. After several phone calls, we still could not reach someone to get the papers for us. I traveled to Basse on Saturday to buy some fencing material for my backyard (which has fallen down four times now). I tried several times that weekend to reach someone who could help, but it was useless. On Sunday, I got onto a gile gile going back to Fatoto, just hoping that we could work it out in the next day. My gile gile stopped to get gas before leaving Basse, and as we were sitting there waiting, a motorcycle pulled up beside the vehicle and the man on the bike said “Are you Maimuna? These are for you.” and handed me the test papers. It was like some strange scene in a movie. I’m still not sure how he knew where to find me, but I’m happy he did!

Now allow me to describe the testing situation. The school moved all of the students’ desks into the rooms that would be the designated exam-taking rooms. The 7th and 8th graders were put together in the large assembly hall, and the 10th and 11th graders were put together in the library. (the 9th and 12th graders already took their exams). In the library, the students were seated, 2 to a desk… one tenth grader and one 11th grader together. Because of all the corrections that needed to be made on the exam, the teachers had to spend a significant amount of time reading the questions out-loud (for the 10th grade science exam, I spent an hour on this). Since there were two different grades taking exams in the same room, the teachers had to take turns correcting the mistakes with the class, since they could not both talk at the same time. There was a flip-chart at the front of the room for us to write on, but only about half of students were close enough to read it, which is why we had to read the corrections out-loud. So we probably wasted a good hour or more before each exam just making sure the students made all of the necessary corrections. Then, since each teacher set different time-limits on their exams, and all exams had two parts (objective and theory), there were constant interruptions when one group finished and left while the other group was still working, or when one group began the next portion of the test and the teacher had to make more corrections. Then the students were trying to share things like calculators and pencils, which caused even more interruptions (Since materials are scare, students are accustomed to sharing in class, but they don’t understand why you cannot do this on a final exam). The whole process was disorganized and disruptive. And I’m not convinced all students were able to make all of their necessary corrections, so they probably answered incorrectly on many questions, just because the questions contained mistakes, (or in some cases, weren’t supposed to be there at all).

These are just a few of the things that have happened lately in school… I could tell more, but just writing about it is making me tired! So now onto the rest of my life….

Planting a Garden

Anyone who has kept in touch with me knows that I have been trying to plant a garden since… well, October or November, at least. I have finally started the process, but here’s why it has taken so long…

In the dry season (November thru July), the animals roam freely and eat anything in their paths, so if you want to plant a garden, the first thing you need is a good fence. When I told my family that I wanted to plant a garden in the compound, they said “Sure! We will help you build a fence first.” This was a relief to me, since I had no idea how I would get the materials myself to begin building a fence. This kind of work is typically left to any teenage boys in the compound. In my compound, this is Abdoulie (my brother), and a Musa (the grandson of my siblings’ half-sister, who stays with us). They go into the bush, cut wood, carry it back, then use it to build a local-style fence. The whole process began back in November. We designated a space for the garden, and they began gathering wood and putting up the fence. When it was about one-third finished, the work stopped. My family began building a new hut in the compound, which required the help of Abdoulie and Musa, so the garden fence project was put aside for a while. The new house was made of mud, which required digging a huge hole in the ground to get the mud from. This large hole was dug right next to my garden-plot (I didn’t think about it at the time, but this would end up being a big problem for the garden). After the house was completed, I mentioned the fence to my family, and they told me that the boys would resume work on it soon, but then nothing happened. For the next few months, I struggled with how to deal with the situation. I didn’t mind helping to get materials for the fence, because now that I had seen how much work was involved with just gathering wood, I felt guilty about asking them to do this for me. When I would mention something to my family about buying material for the fence, or asking for help from someone else, they would tell me that I did not need to do that. Sometimes, it’s difficult to know whether I am crossing a cultural boundary… is it disrespectful to seek help elsewhere after my family assured me they would take care of it? I did not want to seem ungrateful or impatient, so I just waited. In the meantime, my sister, Amie, got married. Her new husband has money, and he gave her money to build a large new house in the compound. For this job, men were hired to build the house, but my family was constantly busy helping in various ways. And one day, I noticed that all of the wood from my garden fence was gone. I think they used it to build the fence for the back-yard of the new house. So now, we had to start from scratch. I began to feel guilty about asking anymore, and I was very busy with school, so the whole thing was forgotten about for a while.

Then, rice prices began to rise, and I began reading about the food-shortage crisis that is happening world-wide. I knew that having a family garden would be a good way to deal with some of these problems, so I sat down with my family and talked to them again. We worked out a time-table. I told them that if we wanted vegetables by the time hungry season comes, I should sow seeds very soon, but I would be leaving for a while in June and July, so I would like to get it started on it soon. We agreed on a time-table… they told me they would have the fence up in two weeks, and I could start sowing my seeds. I had already started composting, and I knew the compost should be ready by then as well. Everyone was motivated by the talk of a food shortage, and work resumed quickly.

One day, Abdoulie and Musa went out to the bush and cut a lot of wood, but it was too much to carry back on their heads at once. They decided to hire a donkey cart to go collect the wood all at once, but when they finally arranged it a few days later, the wood was gone. Someone had come and taken it. So they had to begin again. In the meantime, the fence in my backyard fell down (for the fourth time) from the wind and the animals eating parts of it. Since my back yard is essentially my “bathroom” and where I sleep at night, this fence had to take priority over the garden. I had to take several trips to Basse to buy good fencing materials for my backyard, since the old materials were obviously not working anymore. So we had to put aside the garden fence, once again, to complete this task.

With two weeks left before I would be leaving for Kombo, I started to wonder if I should just wait until after I returned. But at this point, the fence was almost completely done, my compost was ready to go, and I was worried that I would return to find the wood torn down and used, once again, for something else. And I really didn’t want to keep hounding my family for help with the fence.

We finally finished the fence, and I began to prepare my garden beds. I’m new to gardening, so I spent a lot of time reading the “Gambian Gardening Manual” and texting questions to the agriculture volunteers that I know. I finished preparing the beds 3 days before I left for Kombo and decided to wait to sow my seeds the next day. That night, there was a huge rain and thunderstorm. The next day, four of my eight garden beds had been washed away. Remember the hole next to my garden I mentioned? The beds on that side of the garen eroded into the hole, creating a downward slope. Now I cannot plant anything in those four beds until I figure out a way to fix it. However, I'm working on ideas for this, and I think I will be able to repair the damage. I feel fortunate that the rains came when they did, because it has shown me exactly where the path of water will flow. Now, I can dig trenches to divert the water or find a way to block it from flowing through my garden. And I didn't loose any seeds because I had decided to wait that extra day. I did end up sowing two small nursery beds, using some Gambian seeds and some American seeds that were sent to me. I built a small shade structure above them, to protect them from the heavy rains and too much sun. My family has agreed to water them for me on days that it doesn't rain. By the time I return to Fatoto, I should be able to transplant them to new beds. This has certainly been a learning experience for me, but I'll be excited to see what will grow... and I will be thrilled to have fresh vegetables for myself and my family. It seems like most things take about twice as much work to accomplish here. For example, composting is absolutely necessary because the soil quality is very poor. But it is quite labor intensive and time-consuming. In addition, frustrating situations (like my soil eroding into a large hole that was recently dug next the garden) often occur, which can be very discouraging. A common saying in the Gambia is "It's not easy!" Despite the roadblocks, it still feels good to do the work. My muscles are sore and I'm exhausted by the end of the day, but it's a good kind of exhaustion. I think I'll like gardening once I get into it a little.

I was going to talk a little on my emotional state, but I think I will save that story for another day. My life is a progression of ups and downs when it comes to my mind and my emotions. But when I'm having a really rough day, I have two things to fall back on. First of all, I seldom ever have more than two really bad days in a row. I can usually look forward to something good happening on that second or third day to cheer me up. Also, I have Liza in Basse when I really need to talk about something or just get away for a day or two. She's been a good friend in so many ways!

So that's it for now. I'll be in Kombo for another two weeks, so I'll have more to write later.

We just finished our IST (In Service Training), which meant gathering here in Kombo for a week with my the other members of my group for additional training, information sharing, and collaboration on projects. It was great to see everyone again, even though the week was packed with activities and seemed to go by very quickly. A new development in my role here: I've been chosen to help lead the training of the new group of education volunteers who are scheduled to come here in July. I think back to what I was doing this time last year, and I know what these new volunteers are going through right now. It's a difficult and exciting time. I also remember how I felt when I first arrived here almost a year ago now. We were all working on adapting to new languages, cultural practices, food, and climate. In addition, the training schedule was exhausting. All of these things together made life pretty overwhelming, so I was grateful for the advice and guidance I recieved from the volunteers who helped lead some of our training sessions. This is why I am excited to meet the new group and, hopefully, be as helpful to them as some of the volunteers were to me. Along with this new job comes several additional responsibilities... one of which I'm working on this weekend with Blair and Doug, who were also chosen for the same thing. This means I am delaying my trip back to Fatoto for a few more days. While I'm happy to be out of the heat for a while, I'm anxious to get back to my classroom and continue teaching. Hopefully, we can finish this work by Tuesday, and I can be back to school on Wednesday. After this week, I'm motivated and excited to try some new ideas and work on some additional projects that I have plans for... I think the next few months are going to fly by.

One thing that the Peace Corps has emphasized repeatedly is that volunteers should always stay out of politics. When there are political elections, we are instructed to stay away from polling areas. We are not supposed to have detailed conversations about our political beliefs or become involved with any group with politcal goals. And we are definitely not supposed to post our politcal beliefs on the internet. Although we must keep our political opinions separate from our work, it is utterly impossible no to be affected by beliefs and the resulting actions of Gambian politicians. Especially when those beliefs are encouraged by the President himself. So I am not going to share my opinion of Gambian politics. Instead, I'm just going to share an article that I recently read from a Gambian newspaper called the Daily Observer. This is from the January 18-20 edition. You can find this and more Gambian news at www.observer.gm.

"President Gives 7 Buses to 7 Schools

In yet another show of the importance he attaches to the education sector, President Yahya Jammeh has made a surpise donation of seven buses to seven schools in the Greater Banjul Area. The buses were presented to the students and their principles at the 1st anniversary of the HIV/AIDS Breakthrough Celebrations held at the July 22nd Square in Banjul, yesterday. The beneficiaries are Muslim SSS, Gambia SSS, Mindaw SSS in Farato, JC Faye SSS, Nusrat SSS, Saint Augustine's SSS and The Gambia Technical Training Institute. The American type buses will help ease the transport problems confronting student commuters to and from their various schools. The president, in addition, promised to provide 1000 liters of fuel for each of the buses after which the schools should be able to run the buses on their own. 'I will give 1000 liters of fuel, After that I don't know you, and you don't know me. Is that a deal?' He asked the excited students who answered in the positive.

The president also used the occasion to announce his ability to treat stroke and skin cancer.

'If you have a stroke there is a 99 percent possibility that you will walk again. Already I treated one with stroke and he is today walking. If you also take one dose, you will be ok from skin cancer' he said.

HIV/AIDs Cure

Groups of cured patients were in attendance to thank the President in person for their well-being. Moving speeches were made by two of the patients, and Dr. Mbowe and SoS Malikck Njie (full speeches to be published in the next issue of the Daily Observer).

In a jovial and happy speech, the president also cautioned those who have now been cleared of the pandemic to be careful as his medication is no gaurantee against re-infection. To that effect he said 'It is not a guaranty that you will not be re-infected if you are careless. I make it clear that my medication clears AIDs from your system. We only discharge you if the machine that first tested you and said you have AIDs again says you have been cleared of it. To say the virus is now curable does not give you the chance to be careless.'

NO WAR

The president emphasized that his cure of AIDs is free and purely based on humanitarian grounds and not a fight against pharmaceuticals that are making billions in fortunes due to the pandemic.

'Making my treatment free does not mean fighting anybody. Those who see the treatment as a threat should think of Allah as human beings are His assets,' he concluded."

Here are a few more pictures of little James. He's starting to develop a personality. It's a fun thing to watch. Last Sunday, I took him with me to the crowded "Lumo," or weekly market, in Fatoto. I carried him on my back, African style, which certainly attracted a lot of attention, but it was amusing. As I often as I wish that I could avoid contstantly being in the spotlight, sometimes, I just have to embrace it and have fun. I will never "blend in" to my African village, and while there are definitely days that I just feel like hiding from everyone, I'm learning to be more comfortable with all of the extra attention.

Finally, here are some new pictures:

Here is Samba Njie, looking especially handsome for the naming ceremony of his new baby boy. Samba is the second eldest brother in the Njie family and the head of my compound.

Baby James... isn't he cute?

Teachers and staff from my school (and that's my house in the background)

Just read through my blog for the first time in months and realized that I have been awefully repetitive lately... sorry! It just takes so long to get from one screen to the next, I never check to see what I wrote last. And then I forget about it. I'll do better next time!

Here are some things I typed up a few days ago...

I am sitting on the island of Janjanbureh, which is a small, historic island on The Gambia River. I am here for a short break from school visiting some other Peace Corps Volunteers and exchanging ideas for science experiments and community projects. It is quite peaceful here. I have been very busy for the past month. It’s nice to relax and reflect on some of the things I have been through lately. When I am in village, I often think of things I would like to type on my blog, but then when I travel to Basse or to somewhere with internet, I loose the inspiration, or I get so frustrated with the computer that I am working on that I give up and just type something quick or nothing at all… so now that I am borrowing a friend’s computer, and I am not feeling rushed, I would like to share some of my every-day experiences…

This is my daily routine in village. I wake up before sunrise and go for a run. It’s the best part of the day for me. Half of the village is still asleep, so I don’t feel rude about not stopping to greet all of the people that I pass along my way. It’s also much cooler in the mornings. Now, when I say cool, I mean it’s in the low 80’s, or maybe even just under 80 degrees if I’m lucky. But at this point, that’s cool, crisp weather for me! When I begin my run, it’s still rather dark outside… I run westward towards and up the big hill (“big” is also a relative term… what I once thought was tiny, is now a large hill to me!), so by the time I turn around and run eastward home, I get a nice view of the sunrise. After a quick bath and a cup of instant coffee, I ride my bike to school. In between classes, we take a 25 minute break, and local women come to the school to sell breakfast to the students. The most common food item sold is beans and bread. You can order a whole loaf of bread or a half loaf of bread. The bread is pretty much the same everywhere in The Gambia. It’s a white loaf about 6-8 inches long which looks something like French bread. They cut the loaf open, put beans inside and top it with “sauce.” The sauce is usually onions and small pieces of pasta cooked in oil with spices. Gambians love oil, so if I don’t specifically ask them not to, they pour some of the oily sauce over the beans, then add a couple extra spoonfuls of plain oil. Sometimes, my bean sandwich is dripping in oil… I’ve tried to explain that this is too much… my favorite bean sandwich lady usually knows I don’t want the oil, but sometimes she forgets. Other women sell just plain bread with sauce (no beans), fish on bread with sauce, or a bowl of something called ebe, which is a fish and cassava soup (cassava is kind of like a potato or a yam). Breakfast usually costs me about 5 dalsai (that’s roughly a quarter).

The morning shift ends at 1:15, but I teach after-school classes on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday, so I on those days I leave at about 3:00. On Thursdays and Fridays I leave earlier. Right now, the weather has gotten very, very hot… so by the time I leave from school, I’m usually covered in sweat and ready to cool off. One of the best things that has happened in my life recently is that my favorite bitik owner (bitiks are small, local shops) just bought a refrigerator. He now sells bags of cold water, but the degree of coldness is unreliable. The areas of Fatoto that are wired for electricity only get current at certain times of the day, and on some days, there is no current at all. But even so, the water inside his refrigerator will still be cooler than my own warm (or just plain hot) water at home. So I’ve been leaving my water bottle in his fridge, and I go to pick it up after school. I drop it off again in the evening so that it can cool again for the next day. It’s amazing how much of a difference it makes in my day to have a little cool water.

When I get home, I eat the lunch that has been prepared by my family. This is always rice and usually fish, with some sort of peanut-based, or oil-based sauce (once again, more oil). At this point in my day, I usually just look at my watch and count down the hours until the sun begins to set. It’s the most difficult part of the day for me. It’s too hot to do much at all. I’m usually quite tired, so my first impulse is to lie down and take a nap. This is what most of the Gambians do between 2 and 5… is lie around and nap. I can’t blame them. But when I do try to nap, I’m so uncomfortably hot that I just get annoyed and have to get up again. The winds are still strong, but unlike the winds in December and January, these winds are very hot… it’s like opening an oven door. So they offer no relief from the heat… and often make it worse. I find myself experimenting with different ways to sit or lie that may facilitate heat loss from my body. Any surface of my body touching another surface will soon be soaked in sweat, so if I am trying to lie down, I have to switch positions constantly to allow myself to dry off a bit on whatever side I was just lying on. The best position seems to be lying on my back with my legs stretched out and my arms over my head. Any part of my body touching another part of my body generates too much heat, so I try not to rest my arms next to or on my body… I realize this may seem like a pretty pathetic way to spend my afternoon… but it’s what I do… it makes the hours seem pretty long indeed. I often just get fed up with it all and go for a walk. My family thinks this is crazy, but at least if I’m standing, I may get a bit of a breeze on all parts of my body. Bucket baths are my saving grace. I try to wait until as close to 5:00 or 6:00 as possible for my afternoon bath (so that I won’t just continue to sweat as soon as the bath is finished), but sometimes I just have to cool off earlier than that… I can always take another later (and often do).

Once the sun begins to set and it cools down a bit, I can actually focus enough to start doing some work… grading papers, planning lessons, etc. This may take only an hour, but often much longer. I now do most of my work in my backyard. It’s too hot in the house. I bring my small desk outside and sit and work by candlelight. At some point, I take a break to cook dinner, then hang out and chat with my family. Also, students sporadically stop by for extra help, so sometimes I spent a good bit of my time with them. I also spend a good bit of time with little James, the baby who was named after my father. Sometimes, if I have been working for too long and haven’t gone to sit with the family, they just bring him to me. He sits in my lap or lies beside me while I grade papers, or do other work. He seems to like my music, so sometimes we listen to music together and I’ll bounce him around my hut for a while. When it’s time for bed, I sleep outside on a small wooden bed that my carpenter friend built for me. If it cools off enough in the early morning, I get up and move inside, but lately, I’ve slept just fine in my back yard until it’s time to get up and start the day over again. So that’s my day… it’s not the most exciting life, but it’s a good routine for me.

Little James’s naming ceremony:

It is tradition here to hold a naming ceremony a week after the birth of a new child. When Samba (my brother) and his wife, Susana had the new baby, I was leaving for my trip to Dakar… and since the baby would be named for my father, they put off the ceremony until I returned. This was my first real naming ceremony in Africa. Our training village put on a small ceremony for us trainees, to give us our African names, but it was just for fun. James’s naming ceremony was a fun and exhausting process to be a part of. I think the most amazing thing about this experience for me was that how much work was involved in the process. There is no way one family alone can accomplish all of the work required for an event like this. I think about the big celebrations that families in the US have: weddings, graduations, etc. Think about trying to accomplish the same amount of work that is required for one of those events: cooking food, arranging for entertainment, preparing the place that the event will be held to hold hundreds of people… but it is all done African style. All of the food is prepared the way everything in Africa is prepared: from scratch. Chairs and equipment needed for music are all hauled in by foot or donkey cart (we borrowed chairs from my school, and many of the students pitched in to carry them to the compound). There is no such thing as hiring a cook or a caterer. And there is no such thing as buying food in bulk at Sam’s club to be cooked. We slaughtered three goats for the occasion. Women from the community gathered at my compound for two days before the event, helping to pound grains for the breakfast porriage that would be served, and cooking sweets and snacks that would be handed out to guests throughout the day. I watched over 30 women taking turns pounding grains for the event. Even with all of the women helping, it still took several hours to do. It’s also something of a social event and a way of showing that you are happy for the new family by coming and helping with preparations for the ceremony. Like everything else, it is tradition, but it is a truly inspiring thing to watch. The entire community does whatever they can to help. And it all came together beautifully. The ceremony started in the morning and lasted until about midnight. There was traditional fula music as well as a D.J. with a huge sound system (the speakers were sitting right next to my hut… lucky me)… all powered by a generator. There was breakfast and a large lunch/dinner meal. The family had borrowed a donkey cart to haul in dozens of bidongs full of drinking water for guests. Guests from out of town slept on the floor of my family’s hut or with neighbors. Most of the villagers stopped by at some point in the day to show their respect, as well as all of the teachers at my school, the police officers, and many of my students. I was exhausted by the time that it was over, and I barely did anything to help. Overall, it was a lovely event… I felt inspired to be a part of it, and honored that my American family is now forever a part of my African family.

It has been a while since I have been able to access internet. I began this blog on February 18th, when I was in Dakar. I had access to high speed internet, so I decided to post some pictures, but then I ran out of time to type anything to go with them. When I returned to The Gambia, I went back to Fatoto and that is where I have been for the past 4 weeks or so (I had planned to come sooner, but was delayed by several things, which I'll describe later). I was quite excited to get to Basse so that I could do some shopping and finally finish this blog. Since these things required money, however, I needed to go to the bank first. I had been living off the travel money that had left over from my trip to Dakar, but it was running very, very low. So on Thursday when I arrived in Basse, I came to the bank first thing. And wouldn't you know it? The bank was closed for a holiday. Thursday was the Prophet Muhammed's birthday. And then, as it turns out, Friday was also a public holiday because of Good Friday. And Monday will also be a public holiday because it's the day after easter. On Saturdays the bank is usually open, but who knows? Perhaps they will take another day off to celebrate the fact that they have three holidays in a row surrounding a work day... I swear, Gambians and their holidays. It constantly amazes me. The country is 90 percent Muslim and they need to close schools and buisnesses on Good Friday and Easter. So on Thursday, I realized that I only had 9 dalasi (that's about 45 cents) and no access to any other money for 5 days. Even in a developing country, it's tough to live off of less than a dime a day. Luckily, I ended up finding a buisness that would cash my check for me (which is why I can afford to come to the internet tonight).

So here are the pictures that I posted from Dakar last month. Dakar is the capital of Senegal (the country which surrounds The Gambia). The event I attended is called WAIST (West African International Softball Tournament). It is a softball tournament for whoever would like to particiapte, but Peace Corps volunteers make up most of the participating teams. It's a great opportunity for Peace Corps Volunteers from different West African countries to gather and let loose, or just relax. Some people are there to play serious softball. Some people are there to meet with volunteers from other countries and share ideas for projects and plans in their communities. Some people go just for fun. I was there for a little of all it all, I think. It was my first opportunity to take a trip out of the country since I came to Africa, and that, in itself, was a good enough reason for me to be there. I played on the "social" team for The Gambia (we also had a competitive team, but due to my lack of talent and experience in softball, the social team was just fine for me). Here is our group picture. Our "uniforms" are mesh shirts in the colors of the Gambian flag. The mesh shirts are supposed to mimick what we call "bumsters." These are the guys you can find on the beaches of The Gambia. They wear these tank-tops and lots of large, glittery necklaces. They are there to meet tourists with the hope that they may either get some money from them or, if they are very lucky, trick them into marrying them and bringing them to the UK or the States. Bumsters are one of the things almost all of us volunteers hate about The Gambia since we are all mistaken for tourists and therefore prime bumster targets. Since it feels good to laugh about it instead of getting too irritated, this year, we were the Gambian bumsters.

I also had the opportunity to do a bit of site seeing. Dakar is huge and historic. We took a boat trip out to an island that was originally a major hub in the slave-trade. It was an interesting trip and the island quite peaceful. Here are some pictures....

Dakar is a huge, bustling city (about the size of Washington D.C.), so it was quite a change from village life. In many ways, it was culture shock all over again. I've become so accustomed to my life as a peace corps volunteer that it was a little disorienting to be reminded of the life I lived before I came here... citys with tall buildings, highways, houses with mowed lawns, inernational foods, etc. Housing accomadations for all of the Peace Corps Volunteers were provided by the staff members of the US embassy. They were kind enough to open their homes to a burly group like us. The man I stayed with, Craig, not only opened up his home to us, but also allowed us to use his internet, washer and dryer, and anything else we needed... he even treated us to several delicious meals! He was interested to hear our stories. He seemed amazed that anyone would willingly live for two years without electricity or running water (especially air-conditioning). He certainly made me feel welcome and gave me a different perspective of life in an African country... so if you are reading this Craig... thanks again for everything! It was a wonderful experience! Since I've been back in The Gambia, I've been very busy with school and family events. I believe I mentioned the birth of Samba and Susana's son in one of my last blogs. (Samba is my brother and the head of our compound). The baby was born before my trip to Dakar, and it tradition to hold a naming ceremony one week after the child's birth... but my family delayed the ceremony until after I returned to Fatoto. The new baby is named James, after my father, and in honor of my family. The naming ceremony was quite an experience. It was held on Saturday, March 8th, but the preparations for it began two days earlier. After school one day, I was taking a nap to escape the heat when I was woken up by the sound of pounding. This is not an unusual sound since all families use large morals and pestals to pound their food, but this was A LOT of pounding all at once. I left my house to find a group of at least 40 women gathered around, taking turns pounding the grains needed for the ceremony. This was just the start of the preparations... for the next two days, my compound was full of people helping with various tasks. It's incredible and inspiring to see how the whole community contibutes time and resources to an event like this. There were hundreds of people at the ceremony. I had a wonderful time. There was traditional Fula music and a DJ (equipped with a generator to power his huge speakers and system) providing entertainment. My family slaughtered 3 goats and dozens of women sat around all day cooking for for the mass of people gathered. I socailized and danced all day. All of the staff from school came, as well as many of my students and two of my toubab friends from Basse (Liza and Sarah, a VSO). I have many pictures, some of which I hope to post next month from Kombo.The other thing that's kept me so busy has been school. I helped teach at a teacher workshop in Fatoto on March 1st, which I found to be fairly successful and very rewarding. I did a session on lesson planning and another on teaching and learning aids. Thanks to Bess Adcock, my old mentor teacher from the states, I was equipped with a bunch of useful materials for creating teaching aids. Thanks Bess! There are 3 school terms in The Gambia, and we just finished the 2nd term. The end of the term was supposed to be April 4th, but, at the last minute, they decided to change the end of term date to be March 20th, so that the break could fall over the easter holiday (once again, Gambians and their holidays). The best part of that decision was that we were notified with about 2 weeks left in the term, and all of us had to change our teaching plans, schedule last minute tests and make-up work, and deal with all of the usual things that come along with the end of a school term. In addition, I've still been teaching extra classes after school, and trying to continue science club events.And on top of all of this, the hot season has begun. For the sake of curiosity, I put my thermometer directly in the sun the other day... the highest reading is 124 degrees F, and after only a few minutes, it soared above that mark. It's too hot to sleep in my hut, so I've been sleeping outside in my back yard. I had a special "bed" made and I just bought a sponge to put on it. It's quite nice, really. the mornings have still been cool enough to go running, so I have still been able to exercise, but I'm starting to get worried that they won't be cool enough for long. The true heat hasn't even come yet.The good news is, mangos are on the way. They are getting bigger and bigger on the trees... they should be ripe in just a few more weeks! I'm very excited.Well, that's it for now, I'm going to finish before I get kicked off this machine... more to come later!

Salaam Malaekum... it has been a while since I have been able to update my blog, I think. The weather is beginning to get hot again. In fact, we're heading right into the "hot season." I'm not looking forward to it. The heat is worse as you get farther up-country (like say... Fatoto and Basse). One peace corps volunteer who lives in the Kombo told me that when he visited Basse last hot season, he was wearing a new hat. After walking outside in the heat for a few hours, the glue melted right off of the rim, ruining his hat. I rode my bicycle to Basse yesterday after school (I left around 11:00 am), and by the time I arrived here (about 1:15), anything that could melt in my bag, did melt (deoderant, soap, etc.) And it's not even close to how hot it will get, from what I've been told over and over again now... so enough of that talk...

Good news!!!

My "sister-in-law" just had her baby. It's a little boy. We are naming the baby "James," after my father. I think I've now officially become part of my family here. It's quite an honor to have someone named after you. The whole village is excited as well. Everyone is talking about "Tokara Baba Maimuna" (or "Maimuna's father's name-sake.") It's definitely been a happy week in Fatoto. He is such a beautiful little boy! We will be having a naming ceremony in a few weeks, when I return from my trip to Dakar. Right now, I am at the beginning of my travels. In a few days, I'll be heading to Farafenni, then on to Dakar from there. My first trip out of the country since I arrived. And I hear that Dakar is an actual city... I'm curious and excited to see it. Hopefully, I will have more pictures and updates soon...

Here is something that I wrote in my journal about a week ago, and decided that it was a blog-worthy entry. So I typed it up and posted it along with this message.

Feb 2nd, 2008

I think the strangest thing about my life here in Africa is the feeling of duality… the mixture of “new” and “old” ways of living. I admit that one of the reasons why I wanted to come to a place like Africa was because of the appeal of living a simpler life – no running water, electricity, car payments, etc. – having to fend for myself and, in the process, hopefully finding a deeper connection to the earth and all of its basic processes… In many ways, I have found this, and I am happy in that sense. But what I didn’t expect was the side that “development” brings to the duality. The Gambia is an “undeveloped” nation… this is true…. But it has been in the process of development for decades now. The Peace Corps just celebrated its 40th year anniversary here. This means that well-meaning philanthropists and volunteers like myself have been working with people of The Gambia for a long time now. One of the results I see from this is that “development” here is viewed as a process of “catching-up” to the rest of the western world. The Africans see what the westerners have from the news, music, and travelers like myself – and they want these things – but they don’t understand the processes that developed nations went through to get to this stage. When America and Europe were developing, they didn’t see it as “development.” They were just searching for ways to improve their lives and at some point in the process, they became “developed.”

As a result of this difference in how development is approached, my “peaceful return to the simple life” is often disrupted by moments that seem out of place or just plain strange. Picture this: I am sitting with my family members who are singing and dancing to Fula music. Goats, donkeys, and chickens pass by at random. Someone walks over to the well to draw water for cooking dinner – then a cell phone rings to the tune of “Jingle Bells” (I once sang the words to jingle bells for them after hearing that cell phone ring. It struck me as absurd in the 100 degree heat. My sister had chosen the ring for its upbeat tune… she had no idea it was a Christmas song).

Or how about walking down a dirt road, passing women in brightly colored “compolets” with trays of bananas stacked high on their heads. A boy on a donkey cart passes me, going in the opposite direction. The sun is bright and the birds are everywhere (The Gambia is lacking in the kind of wildlife that makes us think of Africa due to hunting and loss of habitat, but birds are still in abundance)… then, a BMW comes pummeling past us, American “gangsta” music blasting.

These are the strange and slightly disorienting experiences I find myself in often. Some of them are just plain funny. I have often run to fetch my camera, hoping to catch the ironic moment on film.

Like the picture I took once in training village. Everything was new and funny then… Liza and Josiah called me out of my hut to show me a scene: The boys in my host family were in the process of attaching a medieval-looking plow to a large, underfed bull. Behind them was the village with all its different huts. Between the huts and boys with the bull, a shiny new American SUV had just pulled up. “Which of these things does not belong?” they asked me. We had a good laugh. I snapped a picture, and just shook my head.

Sometimes these dualities make me laugh – sometimes they make me want to cry. When I was first told that I would be teaching science, I pictured myself in a primitive classroom, teaching things to students that could, hopefully, improve their standards of living – like health related issues or the importance of environmental cleanliness. I have been teaching these things and more, but not in the way I would have imagined. I expected certain difficulties, like a lack of resources, but what I didn’t expect was the task of teaching students a western style curriculum without any of the resources provided in a western-style classroom. I have all the familiar trials a new teacher in America might experience: learning the “ways” of a new school and a new group of students; planning and teaching new lessons – many of which are topics I have never taught before; grading papers and dealing with absent and sick students who have to make up assignments or tests… but I have to do these things without a computer, an overhead projector, a photocopier, or resources to consult when I can’t remember the details of the topic I need to teach. The chalk board is my only means of teaching my students. They have no science textbooks, so they come with blank notebooks, and I give them whatever information I can, knowing perfectly well that I don’t have enough time to give them all of the topics they are required to learn… even if we did nothing but copy notes all day, with no explanation (which is what many teachers do here)… we still wouldn’t have enough time to cover it all. So I am thankful for the chalkboard, although I feel as though I am constantly battling with it. It is a concrete slab that has been painted black. The surface never gets completely clean, no matter how hard I try to erase it (I discovered early that using water will also eventually wipe some of the paint off of it too, so I quit that method). A while back, the school was given a shipment of chalk that was never meant for a chalk board… it was too hard, so it scratched the surface when you used it, and the writing was too light for the students to read. It took me twice as long to write anything, and since I had to press harder with this chalk, it actually made my hands tired by the end of a class! Now we have regular chalk again… thank god… but it’s still a battle sometimes… you can tell when the chalkboard wins, because I’m covered in chalk from head to toe by the time I leave school…

Here I am, in January already. It is a new year… it’s strange to think that I’ll be here in Africa for this entire year... School is still on break, and I am back in Basse, after a short trip back to Fatoto to see my family and gather a few things to work on here while I’m waiting for pay day (which should have been at the end of December… but oh well…). Also, Josiah should be coming to visit later today, so I wanted to stick around and catch up with him a bit. Our Christmas Terdukin was very successful. I did not get to help with the slaughtering and de-feathering of the birds, but I did get the interesting job of de-boning the duck and helping to put the entire thing together. The finished product was delicious! We also had garlic potatoes, fruit salad, salad, stuffing, and various sweet things. I helped make a rice-pudding type thing that had pumpkin in it… it was no pumpkin pie, but it was good. The transit house was decorated with Christmas ornaments, we listened to Christmas music… it was as close to Christmas in Africa as we could get (even though it was especially hot that day… possibly in the 90’s). For New Years Eve, we did a “tour” of different Basse establishments. Daniele, one of my Basse PC friends, had received a box of glow bracelets from America, which she gave to me as a Christmas gift because I had told her once that I love glow sticks… so I brought these along and handed them out to everyone in our group. As if the toubabs don’t stand out enough already, now we were glowing toubabs! But the Gambians loved them as well… we ended up sharing them with various characters we met along the way (and we did meet some interesting characters!). The retired VSO couple from England, David and Sarah, joined us as well. We had a fun night. On the last stop of our Basse tour, we ended up at a place called “Mike’s”. The owner had put up a bunch of balloons and bought a bunch of fireworks. At 12:00, he set off the fireworks… some of which were set off inside the building, and some outside… I found myself running for cover more than once. Gambians and fireworks… it’s a good thing New Years only happens once a year! Now that I’ve had my little “vacation,” I’m looking forward to getting back to school. Looking back on the semester, I feel as if I’ve learned quite a bit about working in a Gambian school that I didn’t know before. For example, I learned that I can’t count all the school days as “learning days.” Between the various last-minute holidays and the “cleaning days,” It seems that I have even less time than I thought to teach my students all of the information they are required to learn for the WASSCE (West African Senior Secondary Certification Exam) . So I’m going to start offering classes after school to my 12th graders who want to catch up on WASSCE material. I’m afraid I’m still not going to have time to cover it all, but I’ll do the best I can. I’ve also learned that I desperately need more resources to teach from. So if anyone is thinking of sending school-related materials, any sort of resource materials would be helpful. Especially text books (Chemistry, Physics, and Biology). Before the end of the term, my grade 12 students took “practice” WASSCE exams in all of the subjects. Unfortunately, the school is not intending for these tests to be for practice alone. The school wants to use these test results to determine whether the students will be allowed to take the WASSCE at the end of the year… If they didn’t pass at least 3 out of the 7 subjects, they cannot take the WASSCE and will have to repeat grade 12. The problems with this scenario are numerous… for starters, the students haven’t even finished grade 12 yet… they still have more material to learn. Also, they were lacking a science teacher for a large portion of grades 10 and 11, so they are missing more material than they should be. Not to mention the fact… and I’ve probably said this before, but I’ll say it again… that the information these students are expected to learn is not realistic for the time spent in the classroom and the resources provided to Gambian students. Here are some statistics: West African Senior Secondary Certificate Examination, WASSCE 2006 6358 candidates did 9 subjects 25 candidates got credits in 9 subjects 0.4% 66 candidates got credits in 8 subjects 1.0% 71 candidates got credits in 7 subjects 1.1% 158 candidates got credits in 6 subjects 2.5% 210 candidates got credits in 5 subjects 3.3% (This totals to 8.3% who got credits in 5 subjects or more) 3239 candidates got credits in 0 subjects 50% To explain these results a bit further, “getting credits” means achieving a score of 50% or higher. “passing” is a 40%. Also, these results are from those students who tested in 9 subjects… my students only have 7 subjects, due to lack of teachers (which is another whole problem in itself) When my students took their “practice” WASSCE tests, 10 out of 41 of them did not obtain at least a 40% or higher on at least 3 out of the 7 tests. These students have now been told that they cannot sit through the WASSCE this year. They will have to repeat grade 12. At least two of my students have told me that they may not return to school at the beginning of second term… or maybe not at all. Furthermore, many of the students are discouraged by the tests themselves now… while this may provide the needed motivation for some of them to study harder… others are saying “what’s the point? I’ll never learn all of this information in the next 2 terms anyways.” And perhaps the most difficult part for me is that I just do not know all of the information they need to learn well enough to teach it… and the few resources I have are only slightly helpful… oh what I wouldn’t give to have internet in Fatoto! After they took the WASSCE tests, I was given a copy of the test without an answer key and told to grade them…. But I had to find the answers myself first. I have to say, that task may perhaps be the most frustrating experience I’ve been through so far. How can I expect these kids to know this stuff if I don’t even know it some of it myself? And the hours I spent pouring through my resources only helped a little. In the end, I had to ask another teacher about a few of the questions… he is the science teacher for grades 7 and 8, and is not a qualified teacher. In fact, the only qualification he has is passing the WASSCE exams… we just really needed the teachers. But he’s young, so it wasn’t that long ago that he took these exams himself… and passed… so although I felt like he might have been guessing himself on some of the answers, I trusted his “guessing skills” better than mine. So this is how my students were scored in the end… Fair? Hardly, I would say. The science teacher I just mentioned is one of three unqualified teachers that we have at our school. And keep in mind, my school is an Upper Basic School (grades 7 thru 9) as well as a Senior Secondary School (grades 10 -12). The teachers consist of the following: Two qualified teachers (which means they have been trained to be teachers), three unqualified teachers (they have finished Senior Secondary School and have passed the WASSCE in the subjects they are teaching), and three volunteers… myself, and two Nigerians volunteers who are both teaching Mathematics. The vice-principal has a load of classes that exceeds any of the other teachers, and the principal helps with teaching as well. Since teachers are appointed to their posts by the government… it is the districts like mine that are hurting the most for teachers. We were supposed to get more teachers than this, but they just didn’t show up. They didn’t want to leave their families and travel as far away as Fatoto to teach for the measly amount of pay that they would be receiving. This is why we have been given special permission to hire non-qualified teachers. We desperately need the help… and these poor unqualified teachers work very hard for very little money. One unqualified teacher who is teaching just grades 7 and 8 told me that he makes less than 700 dalasi a month. (700D is about $28). If he teaches both the Upper Basic and the Senior Secondary students next term, his pay will increase to just under 1000D a month (1000D is about $40). It also means he would be double-shifting, or working the morning shift (8:00 to 1:30) as well as the afternoon shift (2:00- 6:00). The qualified teachers make much more than this, but not much… I don’t know the exact amount, but I think it’s somewhere between 2000D and 4000D depending on experience and positions if they are teaching at the Senior Secondary level. It’s much less for the lower basic schools. These are the things I have to remind myself of when I begin to get frustrated with things like the WASSCE… of course the students don’t know the information. They don’t even have text books for things like science… but even if they did… they may be missing teachers too. Despite the odds, there are still those special individuals who are working very hard to improve the quality of education for students here in The Gambia. I can give two examples of teachers at my school (I am hesitant to list their names because I have not asked their permission to do so)… these two teachers have been posted to Fatoto for the past two years. Not only have they shown up to their post in Fatoto while their families are in Banjul and the surrounding areas, but they are both double-shifting and teaching multiple subjects to students at the school to make up for the lack of teachers. They also lead after-school clubs, Saturday school for students who have to take tests at the end of the year (grades 9 and 12), and help in administrative tasks (we are also lacking some administrative and clerical employees)… I never hear them complain. They work all morning, then the second shift in the afternoon, then the clubs and organizations after school, then go home to grade papers, etc… then they do it all again the next day. The only time they see their families is when they have enough holiday time to travel, (unlike some teachers I’ve seen who leave their students in the middle of a term just to do a bit of traveling… another reason why students aren’t getting as much classroom time as they need). One of my greatest wishes is that the government could recognize the teachers like this and reward them… with much, much more money than they are currently making… it would keep these teachers in the profession (The Gambia looses hundreds of good teachers every year who leave the profession due to long hours and poor pay), but it would also justify the travel that these teachers are required to do for their jobs as well as inspire good teachers to come into the profession. Perhaps the greatest challenge for me as a Peace Corps Volunteer is that the most simple solutions to the problems are the ones I can do nothing about… all I can do is what I am doing: Work with what I have and try to take small steps. Luckily for me, I am not alone in my aspirations, and for every frustrating experience I come across, there is also an inspiring story to go along with it… I hope to spend more time on some of these stories in the future…

Luckily, I've finally managed to post this picture of my family. It's only taken 3 trips to the internet cafe and over 2 1/2 hours of waiting for it to upload! But here it is... my Merry Christmas picture from Fatoto...

Saalam Malaekum and Merry Christmas! Well, school is done for the first term and we are on break now for Tobaski and Christmas. Tobaski is a Muslim holiday… it was celebrated on the 20th of December this year… sometimes the dates change, depending on how they see the moon. I still haven’t quite figured out what it is they are looking for at the moon when they determine the date. It was the same thing for Ramadan. Some people said the holiday began on Thursday, and others said Friday. Then, it seemed as if everyone was going to celebrate it on Friday… then it changed again to Thursday. But really, the celebrations continued from Thursday to about Saturday or Sunday… so who knows? It’s like many things here. You just have to shrug your shoulders and go along with it. As much as I like to question things and constantly ask “why is it this way?” (I am a teacher, after all), I’ve learned since I’ve been in Africa that some things just are as they are… For Tobaski, just about every family slaughters a Ram, and we eat almost nothing but lamb meat for at least three days. I have a picture of my family slaughtering the ram, but I’m not sure if it would be appropriate to post it online… They used my knife to slaughter it, and then laughed at the posture I assumed to observe the initial process. I was laying on the bantaba (which is a raised platform in the middle of the compound), my arms were stretched out beyond my face, and I was peering over them like a small child watching something she’s not supposed to see… they said “Maimuna na susi!”, which means “Maimuna is scared!” I told them I just didn’t like to watch the actual death of the animal… but I still watched, and then I even helped them to skin it and remove the meat. After the ram had been dead for a while, I had no problem with the rest of the process… in fact, I was able to conduct a short anatomy lesson with my brother and his son… We took out the lungs and the heart and I explained the structures, cut the heart open to show the different chambers, etc… they were interested. And then we all proceeded to eat as much meat in as many different ways as we could for the next two days. My brother cooked a delicious stew with some of the vegetables that I had bought in Basse… carrots, potatoes, cabbage, onion… it was delicious. I made spaghetti with meat sauce. I cooked the whole meal over an open fire, and used whatever seasonings I could find, along with a tomato sauce seasoning packet that my family sent me (thanks mom and dad!). We also ate plain meat grilled over hot coals, as well as several different African dishes with meat… let me tell you, it was a lot of meat. But it was a nice break from fish, which is about all they eat, usually. The next day, I took out all of the Christmas decorations that my family sent me (which arrived just in time, by the way). My parents sent a small Christmas tree with little ornaments, a Christmas penguin (of course, anyone who knows my mother knows that the penguin is a necessary Christmas figure… even in Africa!), and a small nativity scene. I taught the children in my compound how to decorate the Christmas tree and let them go to town with it. My uncle mailed me some candy canes (among many other wonderful gifts too… thanks Uncle Dave and Sally!!!). I shared most of these with my family. Then I had fun taking pictures of my family and neighbors with the various Christmas items. It was fun, and a great opportunity to teach them about Christmas. We talked about the nativity scene. They know all about Jesus and Mary… they learn about them in the Koran, but it’s a very different version of the story than what is told in the bible. And the names are slightly different. Jesus is Essa, and Mary is Mariama. Then I packed up all of my Christmas items, along with my mandolin and another bag of clothes and school things, and tied everything to the back of my bike on Saturday morning for the 42 km ride to Basse for Christmas and New Years. Liza took a picture of my when I arrived. I had to laugh at myself… even in Africa, I somehow manage to travel with too much stuff for Christmas! I’m hoping to try to post the picture with this blog. We’ll see if the computers in Basse will allow me to do this or not. Christmas is tomorrow, but it sure doesn’t feel like it. The temperature has increased in the past few days, and I’m pretty sure it’s been at least 100 F during the afternoon since at least Friday. The temperature in my hut the other morning was 95… I really hope this doesn’t mean that the wonderful “cold season” is already coming to an end. It only lasted a few weeks! So here I am, in tank tops and sandals, preparing for our Christmas celebration tomorrow. Something about it just doesn’t fell right (well, many things about it, really…) One of the URD Peace Corps volunteers, Dan, has got it in his head that we need to cook a Terdukin for Christmas this year… I’m not sure that I spelled that correctly, but it’s when you put a chicken inside of a duck, inside of a turkey… he came up with this idea a while back, which we all said, “sure, let’s try it!”, but there’s several potential problems. First of all, Turkeys in the Gambia??? Second of all, no on in Basse has a true oven. We are going to “borrow” the oven of one of the local restaurants, but it’s the same kind of oven they use to cook bread in. It’s a huge brick oven that you heat for several hours by lighting a wood fire inside. Then, when you are ready, you spread the coals and put the items you want to bake inside of it. There’s no way to tell what temperature the oven is, or how long it will stay that way… nonetheless Dan has made almost all of the arrangements. He somehow found a turkey (raised by Peace Corps Volunteers), which he brought to Basse yesterday on the back of his bike. Unfortunately, he’s grown attached to the turkey now, and has named it “beast.” I hope he’ll be ok when we have to slaughter it… Alex, another PCV in the URD (that’s Upper River Division), has brought a duck to Basse (ducks, once again, have been introduced to The Gambia by Peace Corps Volunteers), and now we just need to find a chicken… but that shouldn’t be difficult. Chickens are all over the place here. Tonight, we will probably begin the process by killing the birds and plucking the feathers… then, we’ll begin cooking tomorrow. There should be about 20 of us here for the festivities. This includes 3 VSO volunteers (the UK’s version of the Peace Corps), and one catholic nun. We’ve just been gathering all the Toubabs we can find! I have much more to report later, but for now, I should probably get to the market to buy some items for the things I’ll be contributing… It seems I’ve been put on pumpkin duty again. But this time, I won’t be making pumpkin pie. I’m going to do something different… I’ll just have to see what kind of ingredients I can find. So I’ll be writing again very soon… but for now… Merry Christmas!!!

Unlike my usual blog entries, which are usually about my day-to-day routines (which lately, includes lots of food talk!), this one goes into some thoughts and reflections... the good and the bad. The following entry expresses my opinions alone and does not represent the opinions of the Peace Corps...

Now that I am “settled in” to life in Fatoto, I have finally had the opportunity to analyze my feelings a little regarding the people of The Gambia and my role here as a Peace Corps volunteer. It is a strange position to be in, because the Peace Corps does an excellent job of integrating us into the culture and communities that we will be a part of for two years of our lives. However, no matter how well I learn language, no matter how familiar I become with local customs, traditions and religious beliefs and practices, no matter how close I become to members of my family and of my community… I never have been and never will be a true “Gambian.” And while that fact may seem to be an obvious statement, its impact on my life here is tremendous. I often sit and watch my sister, Amin, when she is with her good friends. I find myself envious of those friendships because it is just a friendship between two Gambians. Neither friend is viewed as more privileged than the other, and therefore there are no expectations other than friendship between them. The color of my skin is a symbol of privilege and wealth. I have found myself in more than one friendship here in which, eventually, I realize that part of the intention of my friend is to be on the receiving end of whatever I can provide for them… and not just friendship. Some want money, some want me to take them to the United States, some want me to marry them (most likely so that I can take them to the United States)… others ask for whatever they can think of… pens, pencils, papers, money to buy clothes for school, etc. And the thing is, almost everything they ask for is a worthy request, but I find myself explaining again and again, that I am here to work… I am not here to give away things or to bring people to America. It is frustrating for me in multiple ways, and I deal with it as well as I can. I am happy with the relationships that I have formed, and it is in my nature to grow attached to people quickly, but I have to hold back at least a little. Even with those that have never asked me for anything but what I am here to do… even with those kind people in my life, I keep my truest feelings guarded. This is one of the many reasons why I am ever grateful for the other Peace Corps volunteers. I can let those guards down and just be myself for a while... It is certainly frustrating when I am constantly being approached and asked for things... from strangers and from people I know. Perhaps the hardest part of all about all of this is that I understand why most Gambians feel this way, so even when I want to get angry about a situation, its difficult for me to do. These people have practically nothing. The Gambia’s primary export is peanuts, and peanuts just don’t generate much income for the typical Gambian. If a Gambian wants to make money, he/she finds a way to leave the country and work… then he can send money back to his family (the dollar goes a long way here… the Euro goes even farther). What brings in more money than anything else to The Gambia is tourism, and who are your typical tourists? They come mostly from Europe (as well as other countries, like America), they are almost always white, and they usually have money… or at least enough money to travel on and vacation with. These are the “toubabs” that Gambians know from experience. (If anyone comes to visit, you will become well-acquainted with the word toubab, because you will hear it shouted at you often... they don't mean harm, but it gets old after a while). Their other image of Americans and Europeans comes from the media: news reports and television (if they have television), movies, and what is talked about in music (favorite American musicians include Akon, 50 Cent, and Snoop Dog… what kind of image of Americans do these musicians send?) The other group of Toubabs that Gambians see here are people working for NGO’s and volunteer organizations like the Peace Corps and VSO (based out of the UK). There is so much aid coming into this country in varied forms… Some of us are here to work, but others come in, give away something or provide funding for something, and then leave. I remember visiting the primary school in Jiroff (where I did my training). Some of the buildings at the school were built by a Swedish NGO, the water pump was provided to the school by the world bank, the food that the children ate for lunch (or what was left of it after much of it "disappeared") was provided by the world food program, and the garden was planted by the Peace Corps. Organizations around the world donate things like books for libraries, computers, money for building schools, solar systems for schools and health centers, medications, vaccines… the list goes on and on. Unfortunately, a lot of these donated items mysteriously disappear, and many others fall into disrepair and disuse because there is no one there to train them how to take care of these items. With all of this in mind, it’s no wonder the Gambians see my white skin and wonder what I can give them. With all of this aid coming in, many of them have forgotten that it is possible to achieve some of these things themselves… if someone doesn’t bring it to them, or take them out of the country to get it themselves, then they will just have to be without it. Some of the more cynical Peace Corps volunteers that I have met have suggested that perhaps the best thing we could do for the Gambia is to pull all our aid out of this country. They reason that as long as aid keeps coming, the people here have no need to work toward sustainability… if something breaks down, they can hope that replacements will come. While I disagree with this mentality, I understand the frustration and experiences that have led them to this point of view. After all, they didn’t arrive here feeling this way, or they would never have come at all. It is their experiences that have shaped that opinion. Last week, we celebrated the 40th anniversary of the Peace Corps in the Gambia, which is impressive in many ways. But in some ways it can be discouraging. After all, we are still working towards the same goals that the first Peace Corps volunteers began here 40 years ago. This is when I remind myself that development takes time… America spent more than 40 years to get to the point that it’s at now. And there have been vast improvements here in the quality of life because of organizations like the Peace Corps. Regardless of all of these thoughts, I do truly enjoy the people and the culture. Yesterday, some of my students went out into the community to look for donations towards a training camp that they want to have at school for a new organization called Ambassadors for Peace. On foot, they covered the entire village of Fatoto and the surrounding villages. They returned with over 400 dalasi in donations from different people. I read their record book, and I saw that most people paid anywhere from 5 to 25 dalasi… which isn’t much, but for many, it’s more than what they have. It is a reflection of how generous the Gambian people can be with the little that they have. I can’t tell you how often students or just random villagers have brought me small gifts of food or hand made trinkets. My brother, Abdoulie, has spent his free time (which isn’t much) every afternoon in the past few weeks collecting wood from the bush to construct a fence for me around the plot of land that I will be using for my garden. Without a fence, there is no point in planting anything. The animals are roaming freely now, and will demolish my poor garden before it even has a chance to start growing. It is tough work, cutting down wood and hauling it to the compound, but he does it without complaint and refuses to let me help. A number of people, including students, friends, and even one of the care-takers at school have offered to wash my clothes for me. While this is tempting, I’ve actually begun to enjoy my clothes-washing sessions. It’s nice to do some hands-on work… and there's something gratifying in knowing that I can do it myself. Gambians are devoutly religious, and I have had many fascinating conversations with them. I enjoy the call for prayers every day… soulful Arabic melodies called over speakers throughout the village. I also appreciate the peaceful look on their faces when they discuss their beliefs. And even though we disagree on many points, they still accept me for who I am, and no one has judged me yet for those differences. It makes me think that if all Muslims were as generous and accepting as the Gambians, then our world would be a different place right now… but then again, we could say the same for other religions as well. So here you have it… my deep thoughts of the week… the good and the bad. I wish that I could honestly report nothing but positive feelings, but in reality, my feelings constantly fluctuate. I knew when I joined the Peace Corps that this would be a challenge, and it is true. This is by far the most difficult thing I have ever done, but the rewards are unbelievable, and I am learning more about myself than ever before in my life.

So now that I have finally posted a few pictures, I can talk a little about some experiences and feelings that I have had in the past few weeks at site and here in Kombo. Life in Fatoto has, overall, been pretty nice. The weather is changing now, finally. The humidity has completely vanished from the air, and it literally happened over night. One day, the bills in my wallet were a crumpeled soggy mess, the next day, they were crispy. Some of my fabrics have stiffened up too. And all of my papers and envelopes. By the way, incase anyone has recieved a letter from me lately, you may have noticed that the envelope is taped shut, and the stamps are taped on too... I forgot to put my envelopes inside of a plastic bag, and the humidity sealed them all shut, so I've had to tear them all open and tape them closed. And the stamps just won't stick any more... most likely from the humidity as well. The temperature is cooler now too. It's been in the 80's in the day (sometimes in the 90's too, but mostly the 80's), and the nights are downright chilly sometimes. Of course, my body has adjusted to the heat at this point, but there have been a few instances where the temperature actually reached below 70 F! It's funny to watch my family on these evenings or early in the morning when they are just waking up. They wear multiple layers and walk around shivering. I shouldn't laugh. That may be in two years! I am going to be such a wimp when I head back to Colorado.

So here are a few highlights from the past month. I've been making pretty regular trips to Basse, partially for work, and partially just to be able to communicate and colaborate with other Peace Corps Volunteers. And because Basse has a transit house there and it's a good place to buy goods that you cannot find in the villages, there are often other Peace Corps Volunteers there when I visit. So I'm really getting to know some of the other URD PCV's (sorry for all the acronyms... URD is Upper River Division). They are a good crew. We've gotten together a few times and cooked American style food. You can buy things like carrots and cucumber in the market here (fresh vegetables... yeah!), as well as canned chick peas, so we've made hummus a few times now and dipped veggies in it. I've also learned how to make tortillas, which are good buy themselves or with hummus.

And here's another fun food-related adventure (you'll notice that many of my fond memories have to do with food! I can't help it... with so little variety to chose from, it's always a big event to try something new) Liza and Danielle (another Basse PCV) came to Fatoto and spent the weekend with me a few weeks ago. Ever since I carved that pumpkin for Holloween, I've been wanting to try cooking pumpkin pie, so we tried it. I talked to the bread baker in Kolikunda (the small village next to Fototo), and he said I could use his brick bread-baking oven, so we set up a time for me to come on a Saturday to bake my pies. So incase you're ever wondering how to bake a pumpkin pie from scratch when you live in a hut with no electicity... here's what we did. We chopped the pumpkin into peices and began to boil them over my gas stove, but then I ran out of gas (and the closest places to re-fill gas tanks are in Senegal or Basse), so we ended up cooking them over a fire instead (this worked just fine). This makes the pumpkin nice and soft, and it's easy to cut off the outer rind (we orignally tried to cut this when the pumpkin was still raw, but it was taking a very long time, which is why we decided to boil them first). Then it was easy to smash them and add ingredients. I had been saving a box of soy milk that I bought in Kombo in August. Also, Liza brought cinnamon and I actually found nutmeg in Basse (It was an accidental find... I have no idea what Gambians would use nutmeg for, but I was thrilled to find it)... so we just added these ingredients together until it tasted good. Then we made the pie crust. First we sifted the flour to remove the bugs and worms in it. (I'm finally getting over finding insects in my food. It just happens somtimes. In the states, I would have thrown it out... here, I pick out the bug and just keep on eating, unless it's one of the smelly bugs that Fulas call "Yuka Herande," which means "spoil dinner," because they spoil your dinner if they get into your food). The directions on my pie crust recipe call for a food processor and refrigerator (ha!), and ice water (ha ha!). Obviously, those things were not an option, so I just ended up throwing together flour, sugar, and butter. It tasted more like a sugar cookie than a pie crust, but it was still good. I've discovered that a nalgeen bottle works as a pretty decent rolling pin, so I rolled the crust and lined the pie trays (small, rectangular pans I found in Basse). We showed up at the baker's compound four mintues early, but he said he thought we had "postponed" it... I'm still wondering why. We said no, in fact, we were ready to go... so he brought us to the oven and fired it up (The oven is a huge mud/cement oven that is heated with fire wood). Now usually, you would want to let the oven heat for several hours, but we did not want to wait that long, so we only heated it for about a half an hour. Because of this, our pies never really baked... they just became really warm and soft. But they were still very good. We gave some to the baker and his wife, some to my family, then ate the rest ourselves. My family really liked it. They have been amazed at what I've shown them about pumpkins lately. Not only can you carve faces in them, but you can also eat the seads and make sweet food from it too! They cook pumpkin all the time, but they cook it like they cook everything else. They put it in lots of oil and spice and serve it over rice. It's really good as well. I hope pumpkins are pretty good for me, because I've probably been eating them every day for the past 3 weeks straight!

I told Dan, who is one of the URD PCV's I see in Basse sometimes, about our Pumpkin pie experience, so he asked for help making pumpkin pies for Thanksgiving at the Embassador's house. So on Thanksgiving, I helped make over 30 pumpkin pies from scratch for all of the Peace Corps Volunteers and other invited guests. All of my clothes from that day are still covered in pumpkin. It took hours, but it was fun! (And the pies were really good too). Thanksgiving was fun. We ate chicken (no turkey's here in the Gambia), and mashed potatoes and stuffing... we even had cranberry sauce (mailed from the states, of course). And of course, pumpkin pie.

Ok, that's enough talk of food... The thought occurred to me the other day that when I get together with other PCV's, we always seem focused on cooking and eating. Sorry, it's what we do for fun, I guess.

The past week here in Kombo has been good but busy, as usual. Yesterday was the Peace Corps' 40th anniversary celebration. It was a very formal event at a very nice 5 star hotel in the area of the Kombo called Senegambia. It's strange to go from village to a place like that. I start to forget that places like that actually exist here. In the evening, Julebrew, the Gambia's brewery, threw the volunteers a party with free beer. It's one of the few times all of the volunteers in the country will see each other at once, so, without going into details... the evening last night was very fun and very, very late. This morning was an all-volunteer meeting (we all showed up but were very tired), which I found to be incredibly informative and extremely helpful. Each sector (Education, Health, and Environment) met seperately... then we met together as one large group. We were able to discuss and exchage ideas and frustrations, learn about who's projects were working or not working, get our hands on a few teaching resources (like paper for a 3-ring binder! Yeah!), and meet several guests from different NGO's and Gambian development organizations. I hear they used to do these meetings twice a year, but they may be switching them to once a year. If they are all as helpful as this one, I hope they keep it to twice a year! It's also been really nice just to meet all of the other volunteers and some of the PC staff members that I've met only once or twice because they stay here in Kombo. Our administrative officer, Tim, saw me in the Peace Corps office the other day and stopped to talk to me because he didn't recognize me. Then a look of realization came across his face and he said "Oh yeah! You're the one at the very end of the map"... you see, there's a large map of The Gambia in the office, and they put a picture of every PCV in the country on the map with a peice of string leading to their posted village or town. My picture is waaaay off to the right of the map. It's kind of my claim to fame here. And not only am I the farthest, but I'm also the only one in my disctrict, the Kantora district. But as far as Fatoto seems, it's not unaccesable... I just won't be doing this trip to Kombo very often. It's quite tiring.

Tomorrow morning, I head back up-country. I'm leaving at about 6 am, and I'm really hoping to make it all the way back to Fatoto by the evening so that I can teach on Monday. We'll see... I think I can do it if I run into favorable traveling conditions. It's really just the role of the dice though. Between the poor roads, vehicles that break down constantly (we had to push the vehicle we rode in on our way to Kombo at least 3 times to get it running again), and ferry crossings (you would think that a country split in half by a large river would use bridges instead of old ferries that only take a few vehicles at a time and often break down themselves... but oh well). Time can be either for or against me. So until next time!

I have made through my three month challenge, and I am back in Kombo, once again, for several events. We will be celebrating Thanksgiving on Thursday, Friday is the 40th anniversary of Peace Corps in The Gambia, and Saturday is an all volunteer meeting... so I took the week from school and made my way down country. Now that I have faster internet, I can acutally post some pictures...

The first picture is a picture of my home. It is a one-room, round, mud-hut with a thatched roof. The thatched hut keeps my home much cooler than homes with a corrogated tin roof, like what I had in training village. On the left, you may notice an old tire (It looks to be below that large Mango tree)... that is the open well in my compound. I am going to plant a garden there soon, so it will be nice to have a well right next to my garden for watering purposes. I also use that water for bathing and cooking. The drinking water I use though, comes from another well.

And here's what the Gambia River looks like when you get up-country. It's much narrower here, and the river is freshwater. Down-country, the river is much larger and saltwater.

I am also posting some pictures of my family. One of the pictures is from Koriteh, or the "Day of Prayer." This is the 30th day of the Muslim holiday, Ramadan. The Muslims fast for 29 days (no food or water from sunrise to sunset), and then feast on the Day of Prayer. Everyone gets dressed up in new clothes with new hairstyles and everything. As you can see from the picture, even I have on an African dress and I let my "siter-in-law," Susana, plait my hair. It was definitely fun to see the whole village celbrating. The children in the picture are Mariama, Bobo, an Ousman.

The next picture was also during Ramadan. Since the Muslims fast all day, they feast every night. On this night, they were just about to break fast, so we had a ton of delicious food to eat (they go all-out for the breaking fast meals), and we were hit with a tremedous thunderstorm. Since we usually eat outside (we do everything outside except for sleeping, really), we moved our meal into my familie's hut... all eight of us. After eating, we were just hanging out because the rain was really strong. For some reason, I found the whole situation hilarious (I often find humor in situations that are perfectly normal to the Gambians), and decided to take a bunch of pictures. I wish I had time to post all of them... they ended up getting pretty silly. This one shows Amin (my sister), Ousman ( Samba's son), and Bobo Kole (Amin's daughter).

And here are some pictures of my school and my students.

This is a picture of the outside of my classroom. The school consists of a number of different buildings, or "blocks" instead of one building with many rooms, like in the states. I'm sure that air circulation has much to do with this. Without windows, it would be impossible to teach or learn in these rooms. It's hard enough as it is. Notice the goat hanging out outside of the classroom. The school has over 40 goats right now.

My grade 12 students. They are a great crew of kids.

Here are my grade 11 students... and this is what the inside of my classroom looks like... it's really much nicer than I expected to have. In fact, I never expected to have my own classroom at all, so this has been a wonderful surprise. And yes, I did celebrate Holloween... here is the pumpkin to prove it! From left to right... Mariama and Umo (although we call her Bobo Kole... Gambians aften have multiple names, which gets confusing when you're trying to learn a bunch of new names). Mariama and Bobo are Amin's daughers (Amin is my sister here, so by American standards, they would be considered my neices, but in the Gambia, your mother's sisters are also your mothers, so here they are my daughters, I guess... it gets confusing). The the woman on the right is Susana (her other name is Fanta, just like the drink). Susana is Samba's wife (my brother). Well... that's it for now, I hope you like the pictures!

It is the end of October now, which means that the wet season is coming to an end and the dry season is just beginning. Regardless of how the Gambians tell me that we are entering a new season, my body cannot help but feel confused. I'm used to a Fall... the temperatures drop, (in some places snow is already falling in the U.S., or so I have been informed by my Colorado friends), the leaves change, the air gets dryer, etc... Right now, the humidity is better (except for a few days here and there), but it's still as hot as ever. It just feels as if summer is going to keep going indefinitely... my jacket hangs neatly and completely unused in my hut. I can count on one hand the number of times I've covered myself with a sheet while sleeping. I still take at least two baths a day just to cool my body....

But from what I hear, it really will be cold here in about a month or two. Maybe even as low as 55F on a few evenings... that would be wonderful. Now that I have a thermometer (thanks mom and dad!), I know for sure that I am getting adjusted to the heat. It was quite pleasant in my hut the other night, so I ventured to look at the temperature. It was a chilly 86 degrees F! I almost had to use the sheet that night.

I am also beginning to adjust to other things as well. After two months, my language skills are beginning to develop a little bit more. I can pretty much accomplish almost any day-to-day task in Pulaar. I can buy things from the market, get anywhere I need to on public transport, make small talk about the day, borrow or lend things to/from others, talk about what's paining me or ask other's what's wrong if they are sick or hurt... and all in Pulaar. (with some roadblocks, of course). I feel as though I definitely have a long way to go before I can really form close friendships with anyone who cannot speak any English though. Friendships can only go so far when all you can talk about is what you did that day. I want to be able to communicate feelings, emotions and abstract ideas as well... well as the Fulas say, "Seda, Seda!" (slowly, slowly).

School is going well so far. I am teaching three classes right now. It was supposed to be five classes, but due to a teacher shortage, they have combined the two grade 11 classes into one class, and the same goes for grade 10. My smallest class has about 40 students, and my largest class has 55. In the beginning, teaching was easier, because the class sizes were smaller. Not all of the students had shown up yet. As the sizes began to grow, I realized that I would have to figure out ways of adjusting my teaching methods. I can completely understand why most Gambian teachers simply write their notes up on a blackboard for the students to copy, memorize, and then take a test on later. Between the class size and the lack of English comprehension (and literacy in general, for that matter), it's difficult to engage the students in meaningful learning activities. Even giving tests and quizzes, for example. The other day, I wanted to give my grade 10 students a quiz on measurements and measuring tools. I really wanted to have them read the measurements themselves from different instruments, but I didn't have enough of each instrument for all fifty students to use (or even half that amount), and since we have no computer or photocopier, I had to write the questions and diagrams on the blackboard with questions for the students to answer and turn in... but with 50 students, not everyone can see the blackboard well... especially when it comes to paying attention to details (like what I was asking for). I finally asked for advice from some of my fellow Gambian teachers and they helped me come up with a solution. I had half of the class take the test, while the other half of the class waited in another building. Then the second group took the test. So it's been a lot of improvisation. I'm learning more and more every day. I really enjoy my students though. Many of them come to visit me in their free time for extra help or just to chat. One of my students has even started running with me in the mornings. A few others have expressed interest in joining us too. The next thing I know, I'll have a little running club!

I've also begun riding my bike more often as well. It's nice to know that if I cannot find public transportation, I can always ride my bike to Base. It takes about 3 hours (42 km). I am also planning on making some trips into the surrounding villages and hopefully into Senegal after my three month challenge is over. I hear that there are some Senegalese Peace Corps Volunteers who live just over the border. They may be closer to me than even my fellow Gambian PCV's... we'll see.

I'm hoping to be able to post some pictures at some point. This internet connection is not very good, so posting pictures is completely out of the question right now, but I'm working on sending a CD with pictures back to the states for my family for me to post for me instead. That may take a while, but I am heading to Kombo in about a month (for Thanksgiving), and I know that I can at least put a few pictures up using the internet there... so expect at least a few before Christmas, I hope!

Well, here I am back in Base... this time for the weekend. Yeah! It's pay-day for Peace Corps, so I had to come to the bank. But this also means getting to visit some other Peace Corps volunteers a bit and taking a little break from Fatoto. I do like it there, but I have to admit, it's really nice to occasionally get to see another Toubab. I am constantly the center of attention wherever I go... it's kind of hard to blend in when I'm the only white person in town.

I have been in Fatoto for a month now... so I am starting to get settled-in. My family is amazing. They have really made me feel like I am part of them. And I've made a few good friends in Fatoto as well.

Officially, I just finished my second week of school, but classes didn't really begin until this week. The first week, only three teachers (including myself) showed up and some students. In some ways, it was nice to get to meet some of the students before I began teaching them. All we really did was clean up the school, and talk a little bit about classroom policies, etc. I pulled a group of students into the science lab and we spent a day cleaning as much as we could, but I keep finding more to clean. The science lab actually has quite a few useful things. I have test tubes, beakers, graduated cylinders, magnets, posters depicting various things... there's not a whole lot of chemicals or supplies to carry out many experiments, but the basics are there. I'll just have to get creative. I'm excited to even have a science lab, really. Especially since it means that I get my own classroom, which is uncommon in many Gambian schools. The students usually stay in once class and the teachers change classrooms. And it is the same for the students at my school, but since there's a science room, they come to me for science. It's quite nice.

We still don't have all of the teachers we need, so I'm not sure how this is going to work out, and the 10th graders haven't yet received all of their results from testing last year, so they haven't begun classes yet, but I have begun teaching my 11th and 12th graders a bit. It's going to be challenging on many levels. I have 45 student in my 12th grade class, potentially 50 in my 11th grade class, but only 20 at the most showed up last week, and I'm not sure about 10th grade yet, but there should be 2 classes of 10th graders when those classes are determined. English is the language that is spoken in schools. Students in some schools are punished harshly for speaking in their native languages. I don't think the staff at Fatoto SSS punishes that infraction too harshly, but they try to enforce it, still the same. It makes it interesting in many ways. Some students have better English skills than others, but I don't feel like many of them (if any) are fluent, especially when it comes to subjects like science, that use words most native English speakers find difficult to understand. Then there's the whole matter of what to teach. I have been trying to figure out what they already have learned, and what they are supposed to learn by the end of Senior Secondary School when they take their final exams. There's a pretty intimidating syllabus outlining the information required for this exam.

Looks like that's all for now, I was just typing here at the internet cafe when the power was lost... it took a while for it to come back on, and now I'm out of time... I guess that's just how it goes sometimes. I'll try to update the next time I come to Basse.

So I've begun settling into my life in Fatoto. School has not started yet... they told me it would start on the 11th at first, but I went to the school to meet the vice principal the other day, and he seems to think it has been pushed back a week... He's not sure though. He's also not sure when I need to show up to work, or when any of the other teachers are going to be there. So I guess I'll just have to check back again soon. I have a feeling this isn't the first time, I'll have to be patient with the Gambian school system.

In the meantime, I've been spending most of my time with my family. They are very kind. I've been learning how to cook Gambian-style... it has been fun. I was right before I came when I told everyone that I would be eating a lot of rice and peanuts. It's true... and lucky for me, I love both things. Some of my family and their friends have started calling me Maimuna Dege, because Dege is the word for peanut butter... and I put peanut butter on everything. You know the kind of peanut butter you pay more for in the states because it's organic? Well, it's really, really cheap here. I also cooked dinner for my family a few nights ago... an American dinner of spagetti and garlic bread. It took some creativity on my part because of lack of resources. But I had bought spagetti noodles and canned tomatoes in Kombo, as well as spices and olive oil, so I was able to use these. Bread and fresh onions are usually easy to find. I even found a few cloves of fresh garlic for the garlic bread! I have a double gas burner that is pretty much like the camp stoves I used to cook on in America, but it worked just fine for cooking my American dinner. My family loved it! They kept saying "Maimuna, Herande na weli!" Which means dinner is good! I was wondering if they really did enjoy it, or if they were just being nice, but everytime a visitor comes to our compound now, someone in the family brags about the American dinner they ate the other night. Now half of the village wants me to call for them the next time I cook.

I have made a short trip to Basse, and stopped into this internet cafe to send my update... unfortunately, the internet is so slow, it's taken me 40 minutes to get this far, and I've only paid for 45 minutes... So I don't think I'll be able to upload any pictures now. I took some of my family and my hut... so eventually, I'll figure out how to get them online. So that's all for now...